Painting as pulse, rupture, and becoming in the Venezuelan artist’s latest London incursion
9 April 2026
The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) presents ‘Angels’, a concentrated yet expansive exhibition of new paintings by the boundary-defying Venezuelan artist, musician, and performer Arca. The exhibition marks the artist’s return to the ICA, over a decade after her first live vocal performance in the space.
Bringing together works from the Angels series, the exhibition unfolds as a meditation on gesture, surface, and instability. The paintings, rendered in paint, marker, and mixed media, oscillate between density and restraint, where marks accumulate, dissolve, and re-emerge in restless cycles. Forms hover at the edge of figuration, evoking bodies without ever settling into fixed representation, suspended between presence and disappearance.
Across the series, a visual language of repetition and variation takes hold, each canvas echoing another while maintaining its own internal turbulence. What emerges is less a set of discrete works than a field of intensities, where vulnerability, distortion, and release are staged as painterly conditions rather than narrative themes.
Known for a practice that traverses sound, performance, and image, Arca here turns to painting as a site of material insistence, where the ephemeral becomes tactile. ‘Angels’ does not resolve; it vibrates, insisting on transformation as both method and meaning.
This exhibition is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) until 19 April 2026.
