Juan Bolivar
The Pictures Within
08.07.2026–08.09.2026
curated by Ginevra Ludovici
opening on July 8 – 7-9 pm
The Pictures Within is a solo exhibition by Juan Bolivar curated by Ginevra Ludovici.
Developed during Bolivar’s 2025 fellowship at the British School at Rome, the show unfolds through monochromatic paintings that recall both the frescoes of Pompeii and sprayed car surfaces, black-and-white Polaroid photographs of ancient Roman sites, and a specially commissioned film — his first — following a travelling musician, a troubadour, as he wanders through Pompeii, encountering its frescoes, its streets, and the friends and musicians he meets along the way. The film’s soundtrack is an original composition by Aedan Kehoe.
The title refers to the way images were inserted within Roman frescoes — pictures, not windows onto another world — and to the pictures we carry with us: once upon a time it was customary to carry photographs inside a wallet, a ubiquitous portrait of loved ones and relatives, kept close and folded away. The project began with this simple gesture, and with the idea that an exhibition, too, could become a repository for memory — a place for the pictures we carry within.
At the opening, Bolivar will perform live, bringing the film’s travelling troubadour into the space of the gallery with an air-guitar performance, set to a soundtrack of his own making — an hour of music gathered, edited and re-edited from across the globe and across time.
The show is accompanied by a publication by Alpine Road Publishing, featuring texts by Juan Bolivar, Karen David and Myles McCallum.
The Pictures Within is supported by The British School at Rome.
The graphic design of the event features the work Troubadour (2025) by Juan Bolivar.
Juan Bolivar is a Venezuelan-born British artist and lecturer in painting at the University of the Arts London. His paintings question and celebrate abstraction's etymology through historical analysis, magic realism, materiality, mediated experience, cinema, music and popular culture. He received a Pollock-Krasner Award in 2000 and 2009; residencies and exhibitions include New British Painting, John Hansard Gallery (2004), East International (2007), Macro Asilo, MACRO, Rome (2019), Bauhaus Museum, Dessau (2019), Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (2021), and Artists Letters, C.A.P., Kobe, Japan (2025). In 2025, Bolivar was a British School at Rome Research Fellow, examining Roman frescoes and their social setting.
