Victoria Roth exhbition: When I Became You

Emanuela Campoli is pleased to announce When I Became You, Victoria Roth’s first exhibition with the gallery.
The exhibition brings together a group of recent works that engage with ideas of queer abstraction and desire as embedded in shifting biomorphic shapes that tickle, swell, twist and pierce. Roth’s paintings delineate affective spaces where imagery suggestive of the body is caught in the midst of becoming, implying the potential for metamorphosis.

When I Became You evokes the psychological tension involved in merger fantasy – the promise of wholeness alongside the fear of a complete dissolution of the self. The work of the same name (2024) features meaty shapes of incandescent pinks and purples that sway, in unison, within a deep furtive space. In this stark painting of echoing forms, movements and colors suggest the morphing of one being into another, exposing the fraught quality of the self. One could question who the you is in the sentence, which form overtakes the other, or when fusion gives way to separation, yet no linear progression emerges—only moments of doubling and slippage between two parallel entities.

A question might also arise around the when - Roth’s paintings seem to be the result of an event or an experience that is recorded as it unfolds. Her works bear an almost diaristic or notational nature, which is present in her detailed, commented sketches, but also in her titles indicating a certain tense or temporal positioning, like Today’s Tickler (2025) or Future Remedy (2025). In the latter, red, elongated limbs stretch around a central, organ-like form, leaving loose, spotted traces of themselves within it. Shapes develop in a dislocated space that feels otherworldly and expansive, with gradients and vacuum zones that contend with the light of the screen. This work imagines the feeling, appearance and meaning of intimacy in a future that could expand what the body can be and go beyond binary or even human-centered frameworks.

In Roth’s work, processes of abstraction can queer in the sense of an active verb - as scholar Lex Morgan Lancaster suggests - they can be camped, twisted, undermined or mutated Roth’s use of pink reclaims a color once coded as soft and non-threatening to associate it instead with an interior, muscly, resistant feeling. Abstraction can also be embraced in its impurity, with forms alluding to experiences, figures or overtly coded symbols. A reference to kitsch and one of the most ubiquitous shorthands to describe a range of feelings, the heart shape appears in various states of distortion. Abstraction can also be metaphorical, as ropes can point to kink and desire, and hooks can evoke pain and pleasure as they penetrate through layers of paint, like in Pierce (2025) or Sting for Pleasure (2025). Forms are not strictly pure nor obstinately non-representational, but rather mutate across registers to reclaim their ambiguity — an ambiguity for which Georgia O’Keeffe’s bodily, erotically inflected flowers offer a clear precedent. For Roth, the tug between desire and discomfort, seduction and the abject, merger and distinction offer a world where contradictory depictions of form and matter complicate these supposed binaries, opening up a space of queer possibility and radical imagination.

Roth’s solo exhibitions and solo fair presentations include Velvet Nerve at Broadway Gallery, New York (2022); Victoria Roth at Brennan & Griffin, New York (2019); Off the Banks at Brennan & Griffin Gallery, New York (2017); Insides at Fan Kunstverein, Vienna (2017). Her work has been included in numerous group shows at various galleries and institutions including Of Flesh and Air at Galeria Marta Cervera, Madrid (2024); Summer Exhibition at Shin Gallery, New York (2024); Deep! Down! Inside! at Hales Gallery, New York (2023); Pizza at Kate Werble Gallery, New York (2023); Jahresgaben at Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn
(2022); Intertwinedat 1960 Gallery in New York (2021); City Prince/sses at Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2019); The Pit Presents / Step Sister at The Pit, Los Angeles (2018); Furies at Helena Anrather, New York (2018); The Clear and The Obscure at Lulu, Mexico City (2016) and more. She received her MFA from Columbia
University in 2014 and a BA in History of Art & Architecture and Visual Art from Brown University in 2008.
In addition to her studio practice, Victoria is an arts educator.