White Cube, Mason’s Yard
Virginia Overton
17.Jan.24 – 22.Feb.25

The American artist Virginia Overton returns to Mason’s Yard with a new body of work that continues her exploration of spatial relationships between architecture, sculpture and the body.

Overton’s practice involves salvaging and recycling materials, harnessing their inherent properties to reveal the ‘natural push and pull’ embedded within them. Through acts of physical intervention, Overton engages with and teases out the ‘material-ness’ of her objects; often cutting, stacking, suspending, bending, looping, balancing, wedging or hammering them into forms that respond intuitively to the context of their chosen space. For the artist, discarded or abandoned objects offer a mine of possibilities. Foregrounding notions of new and old, Overton’s sculptures act as markers of their own histories – reflecting both their artistic legacies and functional origins – while simultaneously proposing future possibilities that open new pathways for association.

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’(1) 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.

Elsewhere, Overton explores the threshold of sculpture’s three-dimensionality and the tropes of pictorial composition. In the ground floor gallery a large square section of soft pink carpet covers the return wall and stands in contrast to the industrial nature of the five works displayed alongside it. Overton’s use of hard and soft materials not only highlights different kinds of sites – from the industrial to the domestic – but also draws out the formal qualities of the materials in each. Working with found materials accumulated in her studio, Untitled (flag) (2024) comprises a scrap of aluminium wedged into the rectangular opening of what appears to have once been the door of an electric cabinet. Untitled (inset) (2025) consists of a sheet of metal fastened precisely within a flat steel rectangular frame, backed by the soft woollen carpet. Untitled (box with pink) (2025) summons geometric abstraction from the electrical box itself, with a quadrilateral sheet of pink aluminium slotted into its structure. In a more intimate way, the circular holes in the box’s lateral walls and the face of the pink sheet metal extend the interplay of dimensionalities and vantage points, recalling Overton’s large-scale outdoor sculptures Untitled (4x8 view) (2018) and Untitled (tulip) (2022) – shown at Socrates Sculpture Park, New York, and the 59th Venice Biennale respectively – in which multiple sightlines deter any singular point of view.(2)

Breaking the exhibition's rectilinear pattern is Untitled (lotus) (2024), a sculpture with concentric galvanised steel strips clamped together by a solid steel machine vise. This work epitomises Overton’s practice of mining the potential of discarded materials and giving them new life – gesturing to the echoes and equivalences that can be made between industry and nature. 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.