The young pros
The Victoria Miro gallery has accumulated a fine stable of young, international artists. Its interest in decorative canvases is currently providing some of the most assured painting in London.
Fantasy and romanticism are the key to the seven artists in this exhibition where American Hernan Bas dominates with the sheer number of his works.
Reminiscent of Elizabeth Peyton, the American painter of louche, fragile beauty, Bas's narrative works feature the figure of the dandy as if he's just stepped out of the stories of Wilde or Huysmans - homoerotic fantasies depicting the beautiful and the damned.
One youth catches his dying gaze in a mirror in a pose reminiscent of Chatterton, while another shows the dangerous games of young men as they bind the hands of an unwilling victim.
Death also preoccupies Israeli-born artist Avner Ben-Gal. His work revisits the crude racial stereotypings and lynchings in old Mississippi - and they're as strange, lurid and smoulderingly violent as any Southern Gothic novel.
Old and new worlds collide in the work of Danish artist John K¯rner. He mixes a 19th-century narrative with bright modernist motifs: shambling top-hatted gentlemen floating in bright landscapes filled with shapes.
But for sheer, breathtaking beauty, you can't beat German artist Charline von Heyl's gorgeous, tissue-like abstract canvases of swirling forms floating in diaphanous space. Simply delicious.
Until Apr 24, Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Road N1, Tue to Sat 10am to 6pm, free. Tel: 020 7336 8109. Tube: Old Street
