‘A true champion of artists’: Victoria Miro’s artists celebrate gallery’s 40th anniversary

In December 1985, at a time when a punk spirit percolated through the cultural scene in London, Victoria Miro decided to open a gallery on Cork Street—then the epicentre of the conservative European art world. Earlier that year, the Mayfair thoroughfare had come under attack from The Grey Organisation.

Members of the punk artist collective, established in 1983, threw grey paint over the gallery windows in the dead of night. Their beef? The snobbery of the art establishment.

Miro was unperturbed. She too felt “out of place”, she says, opening on Cork Street at a time when London had “very few galleries, institutions and collectors supporting contemporary art”. But then again, she has never been one to follow fads.

Her debut came around the same time as the YBA group began to rise through the ranks of the London art scene, though she avoided the hedonism and glitz of that movement. Then—as now—she was one of the quiet luminaries of the British art world. She still rarely does interviews—though she has contributed to this article.

Miro’s artists are at the heart of all she does. And many are full of the highest praise for the dealer: “From the beginning, I could see she was remarkably generous and kind,” Isaac Julien observes. The British filmmaker adds: “Victoria is more than a gallerist: she is a true champion of artists. Without her unwavering support, I doubt I would have had the nurturing conditions necessary to develop many of my works.”

Celebrating 40 years

To mark her 40th anniversary, Miro is holding an exhibition of works by all of her artists in her 17,000 sq.ft space on the edge of Hoxton, where she moved in 2000. In a sign of their commitment to the dealer, 23 of them have made new works specifically for the show, including Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Flora Yukhnovich, Elmgreen & Dragset and Chris Ofili. Miro sites Ofili’s 2002 exhibition, Upper Room—which consisted of 13 paintings of monkeys propped against the wall, each canvas resting on two balls of elephant dung—as one of the high points of her career.

“[It] had a huge impact,” the gallerist says. “There were queues down the street long before Instagram.”

The British painter Chantal Joffe has also contributed a new work: a self-portrait of her wearing a red smock dress and a straw hat. Joffe is among Miro’s longest-standing artists, who was just 26 when she met the gallerist.

“We went to that Irish pub across the road from the Cork Street gallery. I couldn’t look her straight in the eye, I was so nervous,” Joffe recalls. That was 28 years ago, and now the artist considers Miro “and everyone at the gallery is like a family to me”.

She adds: “I don’t know what my life as an artist would have been like without them, or my life as a person. Victoria has always believed in my need to grow and change, and that is not true of most gallerists, or of most people. Victoria is unique—she sees without needing to say, she sees to the heart of what I am trying to do.”

The Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry, who is best known for his clay pots, says his relationship with Miro runs deeper than most. In 2020, the Holburne Museum in Bath staged an exhibition of Perry’s early work entitled The Pre-Therapy Years.

The title, Perry explains, was inspired by a joke he once made “about the fact that Victoria was lucky she took me on after I had been through six years of psychotherapy”. He adds: “Now I’m not saying there is not a whiff of idealised mother transference still going on, but the past 22 years working with Victoria have been a total joy on both a personal and professional level. The gallery is a wonderful reflection of her, and I have a lot of love for her and her creation.”

For the 40th anniversary exhibition, Perry has created a new pot titled Forty Years of Art Trends in a Palatable Form, a vessel emblazoned with words such as “I can’t afford a studio”, “industrial grade self-righteousness” and “tired left-wing point”.

The British painter Celia Paul, whose portraits are often of people close to her—especially her mother and four sisters—has created a new painting of her sister, titled Kate in a Starry Landscape. The work “represents Victoria gently surrounded by her stars”, Paul says.

“It is no exaggeration to say Victoria has transformed my life,” she continues. “And when I was asked to make a painting for the gallery’s anniversary exhibition, I wanted to convey her uniquely quiet vision, as well as the fact that she has nurtured some of the most prominent artists in the world.”

London to Venice

Prominent they may be, but there is a hushed rigour that runs through the practices of most of Miro’s artists. The first she took on was the Scottish poet, artist and gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay, whose centenary was marked earlier this year by nine exhibitions. However, having died in 2006, he is still without a prominent retrospective in Britain.

“I visited him in Scotland in the mid-1980s, having admired his work since his Serpentine show in 1977, and asked if he would make a show in the gallery I hoped to be opening,” Miro recalls. “As I was unknown, I was amazed that he agreed, and it was the start of a long and close relationship.”

In the early 1990s, the dealer was part of a group of supporters that established a trust to maintain and preserve what Miro describes as “one of the greatest works of art in the UK”: Finlay’s Little Sparta, a garden he and his wife Sue carved out of the Pentland Hills, southwest of Edinburgh. A percentage of the profits from the 40th anniversary show will be donated to the Little Sparta Trust.

Unlike many of her male contemporaries who have been preoccupied with expanding across several continents over the past two decades, Miro has only opened one outpost, in a 17th-century palazzo in Venice in 2017. The opportunity came through Miro’s long standing relationship with the Italian collector Bruna Aickelin, who founded and ran the historical Galleria il Capricorno in Venice from 1971 to 2013. “Many of our artists showed at her gallery [and] as she approached her 90s Bruna was adamant that I take over the gallery,” Miro says. “At first I was resistant but eventually I realised how much our artists loved Venice and the small jewel-like space overlooking the canal was a seductive outpost.”

Of course, London is still at the heart of what Miro does. Despite Brexit and other geo-political complications, she sees the UK capital as occupying “a very important place in the contemporary art world”. She adds: “Now we have many great galleries, big and small, dynamic institutions and committed collectors. Many are artist centric.”

Choosing a successor

With her 40th anniversary, attention is inevitably turning to Miro’s successor. She has a long-standing team, many of whom have been with her for more than two decades. Chief among them is Glenn Scott Wright who has worked alongside the gallerist for 28 years.

But family will also be instrumental in the firm’s future. Earlier this year, Miro’s son Oliver Miro, who launched the online gallery platform Vortic in spring 2020, was appointed a partner at Victoria Miro Gallery. “Oliver has been part of the gallery since 2011. This year, he joined me and Glenn Scott Wright as a partner,” Miro says. “Oliver will play an important part in shaping the gallery’s future together with our strong senior team.”