Margarita Zafrilla Olayo: THE FLOATING BOOK
Saturday June 6th- Sunday June 28th 2026
open daily 2-6PM from Saturday June 6th to Sunday June 14th, & by appointment.
Opening, Sat June 6th 2-8pm, 6-8pm Vermouth reception
Art & Talking is pleased to present The Floating Book, a new solo exhibition by Margarita Zafrilla Olayo, opening on Saturday 6 June and continuing through 30 June 2026.
Combining painting, film, installation, sculpture and photography, The Floating Book derives from the artist’s lifelong experience as a dancer and choreographer through her solo and collaborative works
In the artist’s words: “I paint because I search for dance everywhere, in every place. I dance to feel closer to what I cannot see. The scale of visual works opens new rhythms, new possibilities of moving. I play between relative control and letting go, a relational interplay where the elements rises much like with my dance compositions and choreographies. These are dances of life.”
Among the works presented in the exhibition, Venus by the River and Moonrain are a collaboration between Margarita Zafrilla Olayo and the artist Pato Bosich. Developed through allowing each other to gift their own qualities; neither raising nor dropping, unable to negotiate, means to float with its pages, these works grew from concerns that both practitioners shared: the impossibility of seeing oneself from the outside while in movement, and the necessity of setting in motion stable frames that interrelate. In these works, the “static” materiality of painting is given new life through the filmic nature of moving image, while the dancing in the film gains stability by resting within the painted and gilded surface of the wooden panel that houses the dance. Like an alchemical process — where the volatile becomes solid and the solid turns volatile — a new state is produced.
The Floating Book sits within the enduring qualities of love, peace, purity, devotion, tenderness, desire, beauty, light and grace. Rooted in historical mythological symbolism of Venus we move quietly through the exhibition as in the intimate rituals of Venus by the River, the elated young girl in Moonrain, and the circular movement of Dancing Ground painting series: their gentle nature and instinct for returning home have long made Venus a lasting image of affection, loyalty and reconciliation.
The exhibition also includes the reflective presence of the Enchanted Mirror sculpture we find in the outside front of the gallery and the photographic print of They Who Dream by Day which let loose an ode to the primeval forces of nature, asking where does appearance reside, how different qualities shape shifts and their power disguised in the surfaces of the elements: something else is revealed through being harmoniously superseded.
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Margarita Zafrilla Olayo is a London-based artist working across dance, painting, performance installation, moving image, and participatory performance practice. Her work has been presented internationally at institutions and festivals including Northern Sustainable Futures, Tate, Sadler’s Wells, Barbican Centre, and Museum of contemporary art in Rome MACRO, amongst others.