Virginia Overton has spent years testing the physical and psychological limits of sculpture — balancing weight against weightlessness, rough against soft, and the industrial against the domestic. Hers is a world where structures lean, teeter, and warp; where the floor might not be where you left it; where materials meant to hold things up, both literally and ideologically, seem perpetually on the verge of letting them fall. Here, tensions hold back collapse rather than accelerate it. It’s no exaggeration to say that Overton’s installations often bring about a strange sensation of slipping in a dream (I’m reminded of her work at the 2022 Venice Biennale, which featured towering concrete tunnel panels — terrifying to observe with a hangover — or Goldsmiths CCA, which featured bent, out-of-place warped flooring). In her work, vision is never fixed. Sightlines multiply, surfaces unfold, crease, mirror, replicate, antagonize, and shift, and the space itself seems to transform depending on where you stand.
In “Paintings” at White Cube Mason’s Yard in London, the artist maintains a delicate balance between equilibrium and unease. On the surface, the exhibition presents sculpture within the parameters of historical abstract painting, yet, like painting itself, the materials complicate this proposition.
Upon entering the ground-floor gallery, there is a large square of soft pink carpet pinned to the wall just behind the space’s return wall. This unexpected placement creates a disorienting effect, making this viewer momentarily question the physics of the space. If one stands close enough it appears to be the floor, then the wall, then something in between, all the while maintaining the appearance of something domestic — an optical conflation that sets the tone for the rest of the exhibit. The pink wall carpet creeps onto the shiny polished gray concrete floor of the gallery, seemingly turning the entirety of the room into a larger version of one of the works that sit on the wall nearby. This inference prompts a thought that the unstated conventions of the white cube might have more in common with redundant post-industrial materials than some might like to admit, a thought that recurs later in the exhibition.
Untitled (box with pink) (2025) is a geometric abstraction held within the structure of an electrical box, with a pink aluminum sheet inserted into its form. It echoes the twentieth century not just in its use of materials but also in its form being reminiscent of a mid-twentieth-century work of abstraction. Overton’s use of contrasting hard and soft disturbs the associations we might normatively attribute to these materials. Untitled (inset) (2025) presents a sheet of metal wedged into a steel rectangular frame, with a soft wool carpet backing it. Similarly, Untitled (flag) (2024) features a piece of aluminum wedged into a rectangular opening. Overton uses found objects brought together in her studio (she is known for recycling older works too). This tension of hard on soft, industrial on domestic, and a feeling of uncanniness, bring to mind Mark Fisher’s book The Weird and the Eerie. Writing on industrial objects, Fisher states, “The uncanny element of industrial objects […] is that they are not alive, but they are not quite dead either.”1 This ambivalence between the industrial object’s lifelessness and subtle vitality (think carpet in a “living” room) seems to bind this work, transforming everyday materials into something simultaneously familiar and eerily strange. Untitled (Lotus) (2024) disrupts the uniformity of the five works displayed on the wall with its strips of metal clamped together to create the shape of a lotus — an abstract, Calderesque play on these materials. Overton’s work frequently references art history in a direct and intentional way, more direct in this exhibition in the second body of work.
Downstairs, Untitled (Nude Descending a Staircase) (2025) takes the form of a modular assembly of stainless-steel strips, each one foot wide, affixed to the wall in a rhythmic, staggered pattern. The strips move with a fluid, almost poised motion, bending back and forth as if caught in perpetual movement. Overton spent considerable time meticulously polishing the metal, stripping away years of accumulated urban detritus to reveal a pristine, reflective surface that bends the viewer’s reflection. This sparkling finish, alongside the surrounding white cube space, creates a dynamic interplay of light, amplifying the illusion of motion within the piece, like the liquid-metal android in the Terminator film series. There are also tiny splashes of paint on this object, which reassert the provocation of the exhibition’s title. The title of the work is of course a reference Marcel Duchamp’s controversial 1912 Cubist painting Nude Descending a Staircase. Duchamp’s painting, famously rejected for exhibition, is often seen as the catalyst for his subsequent exploration of what constitutes a painting — and, eventually, a work of art. Overton’s piece engages this dialogue by questioning the boundaries of painting and sculpture while exploring the notion of perpetual motion and time. It is a cubist masterpiece bent out of time, wedged into the twenty-first century.
Alongside Untitled (Nude Descending a Staircase) (2025), three other large-scale works made from yellow industrial materials adorn the walls. The press release explains that the materials used in both Untitled (Yellow Square) (2024) and Untitled (Grey Overlay) (2024) were sourced from the decommissioned Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn. This connection further complicates our reading of the works, prompting us to consider the political and economic implications of the material. As I reflect on these works I return to Mark Fisher, and his analysis of WALL-E resurfaces. (Admittedly, and somewhat lazily, the yellow of these paintings remind me of WALL-E.) Fisher’s critique of the film in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?2
underscores how dystopian narratives, when filtered through commercial frameworks, are sanitized and commodified. WALL-E (the film) critiques consumerism, environmental destruction, and corporate control, yet remains a product of the very forces it challenges, a slick, well-made Pixar multi-million dollar film. Similarly, Overton’s exhibition operates within a paradoxical framework. It engages with the visual language of modernism — geometric abstraction, formal concerns — yet it complicates these ideals by exposing the material histories and economic structures beneath them.
In a sense, “Paintings” mirrors Fisher’s critique, offering a quiet subversion of capitalist systems while remaining inherently tied to them, in the same way that reflected in Untitled (Nude Descending a Staircase) (2025) was the slickness of the gallery space, my tired face, and the tired looking security guard dressed in a suit watching over the work.
