Having won the Golden Lion award at last year’s Venice Biennale, British artist Sonia Boyce has joined a mega-gallery: Hauser & Wirth, which has well over a dozen locations spread around the world.
Boyce, a giant of the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s, will continue to be represented by Apalazzo gallery in Brescia, Italy. She recently made headlines when she departed London’s Simon Lee Gallery after only two years. Facing financial difficulties, that gallery has since entered administration.
Her Great Britain Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale was widely acclaimed. The pavilion, which is now on view at the Leeds Art Gallery, took up how music can offer kinds of liberation, particularly for Black women.
Many of Boyce’s other works have considered intersections of race, gender, and other aspects of one’s identity, as well as the ways that consuming images and sounds can inform those crosscurrents. Her family’s Afro-Caribbean heritage has periodically been invoked in her work, which has taken the form of paintings, conceptual artworks, and videos.
Hauser & Wirth said her first solo show with the gallery would take place in 2025, although it did not specify which location would stage it.
“A remarkable pioneer, Sonia’s highly original practice combines not only conceptual rigor and joyful creativity, but also generosity to the audience who become active participants, along with her fellow collaborators,” Manuela Wirth, president of Hauser & Wirth, said in a statement. “In this way, Sonia has created a vocabulary wholly her own—consistently finding new approaches to making art that embrace experimentation with humanity and social practice at its core.”