VIRGINIA OVERTON: PAINTINGS
White Cube is pleased to present Paintings, Virginia Overton’s exhibition of new body of work that continues her exploration of spatial relationships between architecture, sculpture and the body.
January 17 - February 22, 2025
Titled ‘Paintings’, this exhibition centres on a series of low-relief wall compositions, assembled from salvaged industrial materials gathered by Overton. By deconstructing and cleaning the irregular, polygonal components and reconfiguring them into new compositions that occupy the space and form of a canvas, Overton integrates the language of ‘painting’ into her practice while honouring sculpture as its foundational basis. In two bodies of work, Untitled (yellow square) and Untitled (grey overlay) (both 2024) Overton incorporates materials sourced from the iconic signage of the decommissioned Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn. Employing an intuitive approach, the artist arranges the vivid yellow typeface or grey galvanised steel fragments on top of one another, creating layered gestures across the artworks’ surfaces.
Engaging the material’s irregular geometries and unmodulated planes of colour, the compositions draw upon the formal enquiries of geometric abstraction, foregrounding a negotiation between surface and depth, flatness and dimensionality. At the same time, they draw our attention to the traces of weathering the materials have sustained over time, where scuffed buttery yellow and chalky silver surfaces expose scores of accrued dents, chips and scratches. By positioning her compositions on the gallery wall, Overton subverts the sculptural tradition of occupying space in the round, simultaneously reaffirming her credo that ‘use value can be found in almost anything, it depends on the valuator’ while also upholding that works mounted to the wall retain a sculptural engagement with space.
The body’s interaction with architectural space is both inferred and represented in Untitled (Nude Descending a Staircase) (2025), a modular structure formed of one-foot-wide stainless-steel strips affixed to the wall in a syncopated repetition, such that they bend balletically to and fro. Over many months, Overton methodically cleaned and polished the metal, eliminating decades of urban grit. The resulting gleaming surface elicits a play of light that furthers the illusion of movement. The titular reference to Marcel Duchamp’s famous Cubist painting of 1912 – beyond the loose formal parallels between the two works – refer to Overton’s assertion that this is an exhibition of paintings.
Informed by line, form and colour, this new body of work reinterprets modernist sculptural traditions through the lens of painting, while keeping materiality as its focal point.