LONDON.- Victoria Miro as of today commences an exhibition of new paintings by Doron Langberg. Featuring large-scale tableaux of nightclubs and beach scenes, Night is a hymn to nocturnal worlds both interior and exterior, and the spaces of ambiguity, opportunity and liberation – physical and psychological – that open up after dark. The exhibition coincides with Part of Your World, the artist’s first solo institutional presentation in Europe, on view at Kunsthal Rotterdam from 1 February–26 May 2024. It is accompanied by a new essay by writer hannah baer.

‘Touch is what brings these figures into being, whether it’s touch between lovers of many years or complete strangers, old friends or eager acquaintances…’ – hannah baer

Doron Langberg’s intimate yet expansive take on relationships, sexuality, nature, family and the self proposes how painting can both portray and create queer subjectivity, forging a relationship between interior and exterior realities and the ways in which they shape and are shaped by one another. In these new large-scale works Langberg develops a range of thematic and pictorial concerns, chiefly the dynamic interplay between people and the spaces they inhabit. Titled after queer New York parties and club nights – such as Merge and Wrecked ­­– the spaces in these paintings are worlds in themselves, sites of multiple layers and levels of experience and connection. Together, the works create a narrative arc that follows the course of an evening, a night out becoming the morning after as we move from Basement to Sunrise.

Langberg’s paintings often dissolve certainties of form between individual bodies and between bodies and their surroundings. Orchestrating multiple figures, as well as details of textiles, clothing, interior patterns and aspects of nature he builds compositions in which figures – seen here dancing, cruising, reclining, embracing – appear to move in or out of focus, emerging from or receding into their surroundings, at times declarative, at times spectral. Areas of a painting might appear emphatic or consciously indeterminate, leaving passages of abstraction: gaps, questions – or breathing spaces – that lend the work a more speculative emotional register.

Light in these paintings plays an especially active role; multi-directional, describing the hypnotising effects of strobe or fog machine, it also signals less tangible sources – the heightened, erotic atmosphere of a night out, or the collective energy that builds from a gathering of people. Time stretches within and between works. Declarative instants of euphoric crescendo coexist with hazier, moments, perhaps indicative of more fleeting encounters.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new essay by hannah baer, who writes, ‘Touch is what brings these figures into being, whether it’s touch between lovers of many years or complete strangers, old friends or eager acquaintances, gripping a lithe waist to thrust into him or gently taking his hand to help guide him on the path over the scrubby woods on the edge of a queer beach enclave… The touching here is less the lonely touch of trying to escape individual subjectivity and more the smeared touch of individuality already flickering, the sense that the so-called “subjects” are sharing something larger and more whole than individual experience.’

Doron Langberg: Flowers, an exhibition of new landscapes and flower paintings, will be on view at Victoria Miro Venice, 3 February–30 March 2024.

Born in 1985 in Yokneam Moshava, Israel, Doron Langberg currently lives and works in New York City. He received his MFA from Yale University School of Art and holds a BFA from the University of Pennsylvania. Doron Langberg: Part of Your World, a major exhibition by the artist featuring new and recent paintings, is on view at Kunsthal Rotterdam, Netherlands, 1 February–26 May 2024. Work by the artist is on view as part of the collection display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA, at the National Portrait Gallery, London, UK, and in the group show Friends & Lovers at FLAG Art Foundation, New York, USA (until 10 January 2024).

An exhibition featuring new and recent works by the artist was recently on view at Rubell Museum Miami (2022–2023). In 2022, Langberg’s work was also on view at the Institute of contemporary Art in Boston as part of the major group exhibition A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now; at The Frick Collection, New York, as part of Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters, and at Institute of contemporary Art in Miami, in Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from ICA Miami’s Collection, the first major exhibition to showcase the permanent collection. Further previous institutional group exhibitions include Beautiful, Vivid, Self-contained, Hill Art Foundation, New York, USA (2023); Any distance between us, RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island (2021–2022); Intimacy: New Queer Art from Berlin and Beyond at the Schwules Museum, Berlin, Germany (2021).

The artist’s work is in collections including Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, USA; Crystal Bridges, Bentonville, USA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, USA; Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston and Miami, USA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA; Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCO), Genève, Switzerland; National Portrait Gallery, London, UK; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, USA; Rennie Museum, Vancouver, Canada; RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island, USA; Rubell Museum, Miami, USA.