EMIL SANDS: WATCHMEN

VICTORIA MIRO is delighted to present Watchmen, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Emil Sands.

February 3 - March 7, 2026

Completed during a recent residency with the gallery in Venice, the works on view continue the artist’s investigation into the relationship between viewer and subject while introducing new settings and an evolved psychological register. The exhibition is accompanied by new writing on the artist by Christopher Riopelle.

‘What is the relationship between flawed bodies and cultivated artifice? I am always interested in the dynamics of who gets to see what, and when.’ – Emil Sands

Emil Sands, a London-born painter and writer currently living in New York, explores the complex psychological territory between seeing and being seen. Through a focused exploration of physical form, gesture and the ways in which we present ourselves, consciously or not, Sands paints a world rich with both classical allusion and contemporary engagement. His paintings are at once portraits and landscapes; mindful of the codes and orthodoxies of both genres, he plays with their conventions while addressing themes of vulnerability and exposure drawn from personal experience.

Whereas recent works have focused on beach scenes or seascapes, where bodily freedoms are performed in a public arena, new paintings retreat into private realms. These formal settings, manicured spaces including gardens populated by classical statuary, bring a heightened psychological aspect, poised between interiority and exteriority, privacy and self-presentation, physical enclosure and bodily disclosure.

These worlds reveal themselves slowly through technique and composition: subtle gradations of colour and tonal shifts between warm and cool as the brush describes flesh, marble, foliage or water; the deployment of a decisive, if at times disorienting crop suggestive of a furtive or desirous glance.