LONDON.- Elizabeth Xi Bauer presents Bestia, a solo exhibition of new works by Pia Camil. The show marks both the artist's debut solo exhibition in London and her first presentation with the gallery. Drawing from personal experience, the exhibition explores the unstable boundaries between looking and being looked at. Continuing Camil’s long-standing interest in dismantling fixed narratives and hierarchies, this upcoming exhibition invites viewers to connect with their own desire as a place for resistance. Throughout Bestia, Camil rejects binary ways of thinking that seek to separate instinct from intellect and the public from the private. Instead, the exhibition embraces complexity, emphasising the coexistence of multiple truths regarding the female experience. By unsettling fixed notions of womanhood and inherited structures, Camil argues for a nuanced understanding of identity and subjectivity, based on the collective experience.
Central to Bestia is an exploration of desire as a source of vitality, which is nurtured rather than suppressed. Influenced by texts such as Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1978) and Jack Halberstam’s Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (2020), Camil positions the instinctual as a catalyst for liberation. Drawing on Lorde’s conception of embodied knowledge as a source of agency and self-knowledge, Camil considers it a force that reconnects us with joyous possibilities. For the artist, an insistence on pleasure becomes the alternative to being confronted with increasingly restrictive socio-political constructs.
The title Bestia carries a deliberate ambiguity that mirrors the exhibition's investigation into the relationship between context and interpretation: in Spanish, bestia can signify both exceptional prowess and carry pejorative animalistic connotations. This fluidity echoes Camil's reclamation of female sexuality as an act of empowerment rather than shame, a shift personified by Lady Godiva. In Camil's reinterpretation, Lady Godiva is transformed into a monumental inflatable sculpture, marking the artist's exploration of a new medium. Reimagined as a hybrid figure, in Camil’s reinterpretation Lady Godiva and her horse merge into a single larger-than-life form. Part mythological heroine, part monstrous presence, this character embodies the unruly and transformative potential of desire. Through Lady Godiva, Camil revisits stories historically tied to spectacle and stigma, reframing them through a lens of liberation.
Perspective underpins Bestia; by subverting established conventions, Camil unsettles the cultural assumptions and shame long attached to female sexuality. The artist incorporates wooden shutters into her paintings, transforming the canvas into a threshold between public and private worlds, and inviting viewers to peer into scenes of intimacy. Evoking a subtle sense of voyeurism, the shutters simultaneously reveal and obscure, making the audience an active participant in the works. By inverting inside and outside, Camil prompts a continual shift in viewpoint, both physical, through the works’ architectural framing, and conceptual, through the position the works suggest.
Bestia advances Camil’s ongoing commitment to questioning entrenched societal structures. By subverting conventional ways of seeing and presenting desire as a source of power and renewal, the exhibition foregrounds self-authorship as both a personal and collective act. In doing so, Camil opens a space for alternative futures to emerge; ones rooted in not restriction or repression, but in open dialogue and shared experience.
Pia Camil (born 1980, Mexico City, Mexico) lives and works between Acatitlán, Edo. de México and Mexico City, Mexico.
Camil holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, US, and graduated in 2008 with an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Nominated for both the Paul Hamlyn Award, London, and the Schering Stiftung Art Award, Berlin, Germany, in 2008 and 2018, respectively, Camil’s work has been published in numerous books, including Phaidon’s Vitamin C: Clay and Ceramic in Contemporary Art, in 2017. Inventory Press, in 2023, published Camil’s first monograph titled Friendly Fires, combining formal institutional documentation with material from the artist’s personal archive to feature 32 projects from 2006 to date.
Camil has produced solo exhibitions at various international institutions, including Fuego Amigo at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, Mexico (2024); Three Works at Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Arizona, US (2020); Here Comes The Sun, a performance at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, US (2019); Fade into Black: Sit, chill, look, talk, roll, play, listen, give, take, dance, share at the Queens Museum, New York (2019); Bara, Bara, Bara, Tramway Art Space, Glasgow, UK (2019); Telón de Boca at the Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City (2018); Split Wall at Nottingham Contemporary, UK (2018); and A Pot for a Latch at the New Museum, New York (2016).
Camil’s work has been featured in worldwide group exhibitions, including Museo de Arte de Zapopan, México; Centre Pompidou-Metz, Paris, France; CAPC Musée d'art Contemporain de Bordeaux, France (2025); Rockefeller Center, New York (2022); Museo Tamayo, Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico (2020); and Monnaie de Paris, France (2017).
Participating in several international biennials and triennials, Camil has show works including Ensayos sobre la felicidad - International Art and City Biennial BOG25, Colombia (2025); Sky High Farm International Biennial, New York, (2025); Aichi Triennale, Japan (2019); Desert X, California, US (2019); Cuenca Biennial, Ecuador (2014); and the Biennial of the Americas, Denver, US (2013).
Camil's work is held in prominent public collections worldwide, including Colección Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, France; Kadist Collection, Paris, France; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, California; Blanton Museum of Art, Texas; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, New York; Guggenheim Collection, New York; Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York; Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona; and Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Rhode Island, US.
Bestia, at Elizabeth Xi Bauer, will be Camil’s first solo exhibition in London.
