Xanthe Burdett: Vegetable Venus

Wilder Gallery is proud to present Vegetable Venus, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Xanthe Burdett. Following the success of the artist's solo presentation at Echo Art Fair in 2025, this exhibition marks her first solo presentation at the gallery. In this new body of work, Burdett explores the radical permeability of the human form, the body as a site of constant ecological and mythic flux.

Vegetable Venus draws on the dual Aphrodites described in Plato’s Symposium: Venus Coelestis and Venus Naturalis. One is crystalline, smooth and geometric; the other is organic, fecund and transforming. Burdett's paintings live in the tension between them, the interstitial, where the figure is neither fixed nor self-contained, but mutable, porous, and inseparable from the natural world. Situated within an artistic lineage of bodies ranging from prehistoric sculptures and medieval mandrakes to the languid reclining nudes of the Venetian Renaissance, these works reconfigure inherited ideals of human separateness and supremacy over the non-human world. 

In these paintings the body is a site of transformation, entangled with vegetal life. Flesh gives way to nettles, brambles, and tender green shoots; the figure becomes at once host and terrain for organic infiltration. In the titular work, Vegetable Venus (2026), the traditional reclining nude is stripped of its marble-like stillness and rendered in a monochromatic verdancy. Conversely, in Like bees, I feel them brush softly against me (2026), Burdett employs a paler, ethereal palette. Here, the skeletal structure of the figure appears as a network of winter branches, crowned with a burst of yellow Forsythia. Throughout the exhibition, boundaries between the human and the botanical dissolve, and the body is reimagined as a permeable field shaped by the processes of growth and decay.

The scale of the work shifts between registers: large canvases in which the body expands to fill the pictorial field, and smaller works that carry the compressed intensity of devotional objects. A series of six miniature works on board, utilizing oil and metal leaf, depicts a shifting sequence of foliage, masked figures, and waves of grass. The reference to the icon is instructive; these are not portraits of individuals but of states: emergence, dissolution, and becoming.

Towards the back of the gallery, a miniature painting of a solitary figure invites you to weave through a silk forest of faint, translucent trees. These veils act as thresholds, drawing the viewer into an immersive environment where the boundary between self and landscape begins to thin. A final solitary figure is cocooned among them. Suspended within these hazy landscapes and existing outside of linear time, these figures carry a mythic atmosphere. They draw on a personal symbolic language that suggests archaeology from a half-remembered cosmology, inviting a profound reconsideration of our own ecological intimacy.