
Victoria Miro is delighted to present Skin on Skin by London-based artist Saskia Colwell. In 2019, the gallery established a studio in Venice for invited artists to spend extended time in the historic city and make new bodies of work. During a two-month residency in Spring 2024, Colwell began a series of charcoal works on vellum which she later completed in her London studio.
The new body of work in Skin on Skin explores themes of voyeurism, intimacy and representation. The interplay between the softness of charcoal and the organic quality of vellum creates a close connection to the human body in images which question norms surrounding female representation and contemporary issues of censorship and agency.
Colwell’s works deliberately blur stylistic, visual, and formal lines, as Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou defines in a newly commissioned essay: ‘Existing at the interstices of the private and the public, the intimate and the distant, the licit and the illicit, the delicate and the crude, the classical and the contemporary, Colwell’s drawings profess innocence even when they are ripe with knowing.Bordering on sculpted exactitude when completed in the softest of chalks and charcoal powder, her work delivers one thing, only to dare us to unwrap, to see, to touch, another’.
Saskia Colwell is a London-based artist whose work explores themes of voyeurism, intimacy and representation. Using charcoal, charcoal powder and chalk on natural calfskin vellum, a traditional support that has been used in art for centuries, she creates a close connection between the body and skin as both subject matter and medium, whereby the vellum, with its natural imperfections, is held in dialogue with the human body depicted. Often intimate in scale, her works offer expansive considerations of female representation and contemporary issues of censorship and agency.


Since Victoria Miro founded her eponymous gallery in Cork Street, Mayfair, in 1985, the gallery has grown to represent over 40 artists and estates. With a reputation for presenting ground-breaking artworks from around the world, Victoria Miro has exhibition spaces in Mayfair and Wharf Road in London, and a further gallery space in Venice.

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