Domestic bliss, disrupted

The sodden yet still crisp leaves are strewn upon a pond in this little pocket of wood and water just north of the City Road, while up above the drooping trees, fading Georgian townhouses and luxury mega-flats, the sky sends hammers of icy rain. It is wet, it is cold; it is a perfect London morning. Last night was the opening of two exhibitions here at Victoria Miro on Wharf Road. The first was Miro’s most recent display of their stable darling, Chantal Joffe, who had her first exhibition with the gallery some 25 years ago. On the surface, Joffe’s work has changed little since 2000: her pictures, almost always portraits, remain intimate studies in friendship and familial happenstance, and often take place in her studio close-by or, more recently, on the unstable stern of a Venetian vaporetto or under an ombrellone.

It feels like more than a scheduling coincidence, then, that the second exhibition to open at Miro features a new generation of Zilennial artists who are interested in documenting the ordinariness of family life, who seek pleasure in remembering or reimagining the simplicities of an afternoon poorly spent on the sofa with a sibling or an impromptu trip to the coast, and who find painting to be a recuperative gesture to ballast memories against forgetfulness. The three artists are: Tidawhitney Lek (b. 1992, Long Beach), who coalesces flaming sunsets of wild purples and oranges with hemmed-in rooms in which the figures get ready for a party or lounge about on exquisitely patterned quilts; Khalif Tahir Thompson (b. 1995, New York), a wonderful observer of Brooklyn’s human carnival, from the serendipity of summer out on the stoop to cold interiors of broken relationships; Emil Sands (b. 1998, London), whose impressionistic tableaux riff on scenes of leisure that conceal secret hardships.

“My earliest memories of visiting art museums were built around this idea that the figure is central”, Sands tells me, as we stand in front of Aldo’s Dream (2025), a work which depicts his brother turning back to where we are, away from two wading companions and a central horizon line soaked in the wettest aqua-blues. This device, in which a figure stares from a fictional composition ‘to us’, in Sands’ words, must be used sparingly in the artist’s practice so as not to dull its emotional power through overuse. The scene itself, which sees three handsome young men at leisure on the water, seeing and being seen, recalls earlier versions of the bathers, a genre of predominantly Impressionist and post-Impressionist painting (discussed beautifully in an accompanying text by the National Gallery’s Christopher Riopelle). If, for Cézanne, Renoir, and Degas, the bather embodied the insouciant thrills of modern life then for Sands it represents the frigid hesitancy that one might feel when not totally at ease in one’s skin. “I am interested in the body and interested in water as a kind of middle state”, he says, “a place where we feel exposed all the time.”

Most importantly for Sands – and, for different reasons, for many of us, too – these are not nostalgic landscapes of pure joy and carefree abandon. Since suffering an accident at birth which damaged his cerebral motor cortex, the artist has lived with cerebral palsy and so he recalls beaches as a “scary places” where he could never walk barefoot and his family were “constantly watching” him. Most of all, he recalls a paralysing atmosphere of  “eyes on Emil”  due to well-founded fears of him falling and hurting himself. A self-described “terrible swimmer”, Sands was made to get into the water every morning before school as part of his intensive physiotherapy programme. How could the water be a neutral place for him? “I am interested in what our bodies say about us, and what they say about the worlds in which we live.” As we stand in front of Rising Skies (2025), we move past this as a depiction of his “mother’s ass” to remark on how the central female figure sprints away from our subject position and towards the water, her arms outstretched as though a child let loose on the sea for the first time. It is a picture of happiness, to be sure, but one can’t forget the worries she must have suppressed to remove her son from her sight.

Sands, who did not study at art school but at Cambridge to read Classics, has just finished the first draft of his first feature-length book, published next spring by Picador. I Am Not Achilles has been described as “a lyrical coming-of-age memoir about physical disability and ideals of beauty.” I ask him what he can do in words that he can’t on the canvas. “The book is about my fixation with other people’s bodies”, Sands says, and “the contemporary ideas of success, normality, and beauty all being wrapped up into one another”, an honest account of his life that will also examine to the myths and ancient histories of “marble statuary, muscles, and masculinity.” Sands writes in the morning from 7-11am – all good writers’ golden window of creativity – and then paints in the afternoon, and for a long time felt that the two pursuits were entirely separate. Now, he sees them as more aligned. “Since writing the book, my paintings have become more narrative-led and focused on storytelling – I am more aware of what I want to say, in print and in the paintings, and they help each other.”

Like Sands, Lek stages her paintings in a kind of anxious paradise but, unlike him, fastens her figures in interiors. In Can I Hold You? (2025) we find ourselves in a private world, like a snapshot in a family photo album. A mother, sequentially the starting point for the composition, beams at her baby daughter who, in turn, gazes with unbridled glee to someone outside of our field of vision; on the old TV set we recognise painfully contemporary headlines: “CA CHALLENGING TRUMP MOVE TO END BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP”, a policy linked to widespread ICE raids across the state on homes such as this one; outside the sky grades downwards from deep purple to yellow to nitrate blue, as though a chemical accident has consumed the entirety of the Californian sky beyond. ‘”I’m a beach girl”, Lek says, with a smile, “and I love to go roller-skating.” One time when she was out skating, Lek was overwhelmed by the unreal pinkness of the sky, an experience which reminded her of the simple truth that, no matter who we are, and no matter what we are running from, “we all share the same sky.” Sunrises and sunsets accented by palm trees serve as just one example of the transitional spaces that animate these pictures, together with open doors which when closed become mirrors, make-shift balconies, and ajar porch gates. “My pictures are displaced”, says Lek, whose work seems to capture how even the safest home sanctuaries  can become fraught by the premonition of some future violence.

Lek’s family fled Cambodia for Southern California during the Khmer Rouge genocide, which resulted in the deaths of 1.5 – 2 million people from 1975 to 1979 (nearly 25% of Cambodia’s population in 1975), and so the shadow of that atrocity emerges in mysterious ways in her work. “All of that ugliness, all of that crazy chaos, all of that violence, really did trickle into the generations who came after”, Lek reflects, and even though she herself has “no direct connection to the country, except through my parents, I still could just tell that the aftermath was incredibly consequential.” Lek’s mother does not speak English, and it is through various symbolic objects like bulk 10kg bags of Battambang rice and statues of Buddha surrounded by lilies that the artist leaves traces – as though little words or phrases – to her Cambodian heritage. Sometimes, though, that inheritance is dark. If one spends a few seconds with What Are You Looking At? (2025), you’d assume that the titular question is posed by the recalcitrant teenager who, scrutinising herself in her bedroom mirror, deflects the gaze of her agitated mother. The truth, though, is that the two women are separated not (or not only) by generations or even a language barrier but by monstrously blue hands with long yellow fingernails – the kinds of hands one might expect to find in a David Lynch nightmare sequence – hiding in the closet, like the spectre of an unspoken past, or the genocide itself.

Thompson, who grew up in Canarsie, New York, but whose subject is the teeming urban energy of Bedford-Stuyvesant (or Bed-Stuy), started painting portraits in high school, mostly of close and distant relatives alike. He too scoured boxes and boxes of photo albums for imagery, and in his works he sometimes reimagines family members whom he barely knew and brings them into view. It was not until college that Thompson discovered the work of Neel when, in a crit, a tutor compared his work to hers. There is an obvious affinity between Thompson and Neel, centred around their shared love and palpable sympathy for the New Yorker as a figure at once cosmopolitan yet territorial, open to the world yet someone who is all too ready to hit back out at that world if it hits out at them. When we speak, though, Thompson is quick to stress the influence of European artists, from the School of London (especially Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon), as well as the German Expressionists (particularly Ernst Ludwig Kirchner), but returns to America with Kerry James Marshall, whose major retrospective he has just seen at the Royal Academy. “I first saw Marshall’s work at the Met Breuer and was struck by how revolutionary it was”, Thompson tells me with an unguarded exuberance, noting how Marshall played around with “flat versus round, graphic imagery versus expressive or hyper-real.”

Thompson doesn’t seem to believe in distinctions between formal opposites in painting, and thinks nothing of putting stray letters into his paintings which don’t (or are not meant to) spell out legible words. In Pink Clouds (2025) – where, as in Lek’s California, Brooklyn is choked by a vividly unnatural sky – a couple are struggling to communicate: she is hovering nervously by the doorway while he, performatively fixing his glare into the middle distance with a studied broodiness, refuses to meet her eyes. Various linguistic and numerical signs – C, f, Y, h, 7, sometimes back to front or upside down, and some with their own shadow – levitate across the room, as though a dispersed language hovers around these disconnected lovers, waiting for them to be picked up and reassembled into words of apology or understanding. Thompson references the tapestry’s power of storytelling or the bold graphic quality of Jasper Johns’ letters.

Elsewhere, in Street Scene in Bed-Stuy (2025), what seems like a very flat painting of a neighbourhood scene really opens up. As in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, we see through the windows and shutters of this most densely populated metropolis, to a woman with blue eyeliner and a pink dress rehearsing her look for a night out, to couples negotiating their weekend, or to a mother and daughter addressing something difficult that they should have acknowledged much earlier. These are all miniature portraits within a larger street scene, fizzing with all the restless life of a city which can never sit still. As Thompson says, “it’s almost a window into another world and so to see all of these works next to each other in the show [together with Sands and Lek], they really are windows into different experiences and personal histories but they all share a common goal in terms of, well, life.” The work of Sands, Lek, and Thompson, to say nothing of Joffe, are not particularly avant-garde. They’re not trying to change the world, but they do change how we see the little worlds in which we live, those little spheres of rooms and streets and sky.