In December 1985, at a time when a punk spirit percolated through the cultural scene in London, Victoria Miro decided to open a gallery on Cork Street\u2014then the epicentre of the conservative European art world. Earlier that year, the Mayfair thoroughfare had come under attack from The Grey Organisation. <\/p>\n
Members of the punk artist collective, established in 1983, threw grey paint over the gallery windows in the dead of night. Their beef? The snobbery of the art establishment.<\/p>\n
Miro was unperturbed. She too felt \u201cout of place\u201d, she says, opening on Cork Street at a time when London had \u201cvery few galleries, institutions and collectors supporting contemporary art\u201d. But then again, she has never been one to follow fads.<\/p>\n
Her debut came around the same time as the YBA group began to rise through the ranks of the London art scene, though she avoided the hedonism and glitz of that movement. Then\u2014as now\u2014she was one of the quiet luminaries of the British art world. She still rarely does interviews\u2014though she has contributed to this article.<\/p>\n
Miro’s artists are at the heart of all she does. And many are full of the highest praise for the dealer: \u201cFrom the beginning, I could see she was remarkably generous and kind,\u201d Isaac Julien observes. The British filmmaker adds: \u201cVictoria is more than a gallerist: she is a true champion of artists. Without her unwavering support, I doubt I would have had the nurturing conditions necessary to develop many of my works.\u201d<\/p>\n
Celebrating 40 years<\/p>\n
To mark her 40th anniversary, Miro is holding an exhibition of works by all of her artists in her 17,000 sq.ft space on the edge of Hoxton, where she moved in 2000. In a sign of their commitment to the dealer, 23 of them have made new works specifically for the show, including Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Flora Yukhnovich, Elmgreen & Dragset and Chris Ofili. Miro sites Ofili’s 2002 exhibition, Upper Room\u2014which consisted of 13 paintings of monkeys propped against the wall, each canvas resting on two balls of elephant dung\u2014as one of the high points of her career. <\/p>\n
\u201c[It] had a huge impact,\u201d the gallerist says. \u201cThere were queues down the street long before Instagram.\u201d<\/p>\n
The British painter Chantal Joffe has also contributed a new work: a self-portrait of her wearing a red smock dress and a straw hat. Joffe is among Miro\u2019s longest-standing artists, who was just 26 when she met the gallerist. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe went to that Irish pub across the road from the Cork Street gallery. I couldn\u2019t look her straight in the eye, I was so nervous,\u201d Joffe recalls. That was 28 years ago, and now the artist considers Miro \u201cand everyone at the gallery is like a family to me\u201d. <\/p>\n
She adds: \u201cI don\u2019t know what my life as an artist would have been like without them, or my life as a person. Victoria has always believed in my need to grow and change, and that is not true of most gallerists, or of most people. Victoria is unique\u2014she sees without needing to say, she sees to the heart of what I am trying to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry, who is best known for his clay pots, says his relationship with Miro runs deeper than most. In 2020, the Holburne Museum in Bath staged an exhibition of Perry\u2019s early work entitled The Pre-Therapy Years.<\/p>\n
The title, Perry explains, was inspired by a joke he once made \u201cabout the fact that Victoria was lucky she took me on after I had been through six years of psychotherapy\u201d. He adds: \u201cNow I\u2019m not saying there is not a whiff of idealised mother transference still going on, but the past 22 years working with Victoria have been a total joy on both a personal and professional level. The gallery is a wonderful reflection of her, and I have a lot of love for her and her creation.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the 40th anniversary exhibition, Perry has created a new pot titled Forty Years of Art Trends in a Palatable Form, a vessel emblazoned with words such as \u201cI can’t afford a studio\u201d, \u201cindustrial grade self-righteousness\u201d and \u201ctired left-wing point\u201d.<\/p>\n
The British painter Celia Paul, whose portraits are often of people close to her\u2014especially her mother and four sisters\u2014has created a new painting of her sister, titled Kate in a Starry Landscape. The work \u201crepresents Victoria gently surrounded by her stars\u201d, Paul says. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt is no exaggeration to say Victoria has transformed my life,\u201d she continues. \u201cAnd when I was asked to make a painting for the gallery\u2019s anniversary exhibition, I wanted to convey her uniquely quiet vision, as well as the fact that she has nurtured some of the most prominent artists in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
London to Venice<\/p>\n
Prominent they may be, but there is a hushed rigour that runs through the practices of most of Miro\u2019s artists. The first she took on was the Scottish poet, artist and gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay, whose centenary was marked earlier this year by nine exhibitions. However, having died in 2006, he is still without a prominent retrospective in Britain.<\/p>\n
\u201cI visited him in Scotland in the mid-1980s, having admired his work since his Serpentine show in 1977, and asked if he would make a show in the gallery I hoped to be opening,\u201d Miro recalls. \u201cAs I was unknown, I was amazed that he agreed, and it was the start of a long and close relationship.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the early 1990s, the dealer was part of a group of supporters that established a trust to maintain and preserve what Miro describes as \u201cone of the greatest works of art in the UK\u201d: Finlay\u2019s Little Sparta, a garden he and his wife Sue carved out of the Pentland Hills, southwest of Edinburgh. A percentage of the profits from the 40th anniversary show will be donated to the Little Sparta Trust.<\/p>\n
Unlike many of her male contemporaries who have been preoccupied with expanding across several continents over the past two decades, Miro has only opened one outpost, in a 17th-century palazzo in Venice in 2017. The opportunity came through Miro\u2019s long standing relationship with the Italian collector Bruna Aickelin, who founded and ran the historical Galleria il Capricorno in Venice from 1971 to 2013. \u201cMany of our artists showed at her gallery [and] as she approached her 90s Bruna was adamant that I take over the gallery,\u201d Miro says. \u201cAt first I was resistant but eventually I realised how much our artists loved Venice and the small jewel-like space overlooking the canal was a seductive outpost.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course, London is still at the heart of what Miro does. Despite Brexit and other geo-political complications, she sees the UK capital as occupying \u201ca very important place in the contemporary art world\u201d. She adds: \u201cNow we have many great galleries, big and small, dynamic institutions and committed collectors. Many are artist centric.\u201d<\/p>\n
Choosing a successor <\/p>\n
With her 40th anniversary, attention is inevitably turning to Miro\u2019s successor. She has a long-standing team, many of whom have been with her for more than two decades. Chief among them is Glenn Scott Wright who has worked alongside the gallerist for 28 years.<\/p>\n
But family will also be instrumental in the firm\u2019s future. Earlier this year, Miro\u2019s son Oliver Miro, who launched the online gallery platform Vortic in spring 2020, was appointed a partner at Victoria Miro Gallery. \u201cOliver has been part of the gallery since 2011. This year, he joined me and Glenn Scott Wright as a partner,\u201d Miro says. \u201cOliver will play an important part in shaping the gallery\u2019s future together with our strong senior team.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In December 1985, at a time when a punk spirit percolated through the cultural scene in London, Victoria…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":164158,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3939],"tags":[9929,4021,4020,68838,4022,77,62052,62053,16,15,68839],"class_list":{"0":"post-164157","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-art-market","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-commercial-galleries","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-london-gallery-weekend","15":"tag-london-gallery-weekend-2025","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom","18":"tag-victoria-miro"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114638959645184966","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164157\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/164158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}