Whitechapel Gallery kick-starts its anniversary year with the most extensive presentation to date of the acclaimed Freelands Award and Turner Prize winning artist, Veronica Ryan, OBE, RA (b. 1956, Plymouth, Montserrat) – one of the most distinctive artists working in sculpture today.
Spanning four decades, the work of Veronica Ryan is gathered here with unusual sensitivity. The sheer number of objects (over 100) might suggest density, but the effect is instead one of slow spacing, intimacy and pause.
Ryan’s sculptures, whether in bronze, plaster, marble or textile, carry a sense of having been handled into being: stitched, cast, coaxed. Each piece seems to hold its own breath; they are not declarations, so much as propositions.
Much of the exhibition’s emotional weight lies in its recurring motifs of seeds, pods, and vessels, which appear in various states of enclosure and exposure. These forms suggest protection and vulnerability in equal measure, hovering between nurture and containment. In Relics in the Pillow of Dreams (1985), small bronze pod-like shapes rest on a plaster pillow, a work that feels both tender and faintly uneasy, as though memory itself has been given a precarious physical form.
Elsewhere, Quoit Montserrat (1998) introduces a different register. The cool authority of marble is interrupted by rubber casts of soursop fruit, an invocation of Ryan’s Caribbean heritage that is neither nostalgic nor declarative, but quietly insistent. The dialogue here extends outward, brushing against the legacy of Barbara Hepworth while remaining distinctly Ryan’s own.
The more recent Multiple Conversations series (2019–ongoing) distils her concerns further. These small, hand-sized objects invite a closer kind of looking—one that feels almost private. In contrast, the monumental Untitled (Magnolia Pod, 2024) expands her language into public space, though without losing its introspective core.
What emerges across the exhibition is a practice attuned to what cannot easily be seen: memory, displacement, care, and the slow processes of repair. Ryan does not so much represent these themes as materialise them, allowing the viewer to encounter them obliquely, through texture, weight, and form. The result is an exhibition that lingers—not loudly, but persistently—in the mind.
Multiple Conversations runs from 1 April – 14 June 2026 at London’s Whitechapel Gallery.
Header: Veronica Ryan, Along a Spectrum, 2021. Installation view, Spike Island, Bristol. Commissioned by Spike Island, Bristol and supported by Freelands Foundation. Courtesy of Spike Island, Bristol and Alison Jacques. Photo Max MacClure
