María Berrío’s new works are a whirlwind of energy. A mix of collage and painting, The Spectators (2024) shows a mass of women in what appears to be both expressive costume and regimented uniform. Some look directly at the viewer, shielded by large cat masks, while others with exposed faces have a deadpan stare. Many seem lost in their own thought or activity. The effect is unnerving: Is the viewer a known and recognized entity in the room or a silent observer? The composition is intense, as though we are standing within the huddle rather than watching from afar.

María Berrío, The Spectators (2024). © María Berrío. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.

The piece is included in “The End of the Ritual” at Victoria Miro (until January 18, 2025), a solo show full of frenetic energy. In some works, the artist employs dizzying viewpoints from above. In contrast with her more static and formally composed previous pieces, this show embraces playful chaos.

“It has felt like constructing a world over the last couple of years, as different characters have come into my work,” the artist said in an interview with Artnet ahead of the show opening. “This body of work feels a bit more aggressive, this communion of all the characters I have created over time. My intention was to show these chaotic feelings. It’s how the world feels, this overstimulated exhaustion. There are also moments of extreme detail. I had a lot of fun making them.”

Installation view, “María Berrío: The End of Ritual”
Victoria Miro. © María Berrío. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.

Berrío was drawn to rituals as a contrast to hyper-individualized 21st-century culture, which seems to have lost the capacity for community and shared experience. She was also interested in exploring the nature of group connection without the disturbance of technology. The energy and movement within the works has been informed, in part, by Berrío’s collaboration with New York choreographer Andrea Miller. The artist dressed dancers in costumes and masks she has collected over the last ten years, from Venice, Mexico, and Spain.

Masks both reveal and conceal the person behind them, allowing the wearer to run wild without the usual inhibitions of being recognized or exposed. “Masks and costumes can make you feel free, but also create these otherworldly scenes where you feel like you’re under a spell or ritual that’s happening around you and you don’t know what it is,” she said. “It was wonderful to see when I dressed the dancers and they completely changed. It also connects with the current world where things can feel quite surreal, and we don’t know how to behave or how to act.”

María Berrío, Elysium Mons (2024). © María Berrío. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.

The ritualistic masquerade of the work has a magical feel, connecting with Berrío’s love of fantasy, folklore, and more bizarre forms of expression. She is included in the Hepworth Wakefield’s “Forbidden Territories” (until April 21, 2025), an exploration of 100 years of surrealism. Her work in this group show examines identity and autofiction, as seen through bodies of water. This surreal nature of the work at times brings a much-needed lightness. While many of the new pieces have a sinister undertone, as characters appear to find themselves compelled by an outside force, the recurring cat mask provides a sense of comedy. It is almost like a jester figure. “The cat became this guard of the work, the ruler of this series,” she considered. “I find him very humorous and mysterious.”

Portrait of María Berrío, 2024. © Gautier Deblonde
Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.

Over the last few years, Berrío has honed an intricate technique, working with delicate layers of Japanese washi papers and watercolor on linen. The paper she uses is already toned or patterned, all made by the same family-run company, and she has previously described working with this material like paint as she layers it up. Despite the intensity of some of her compositions, the pieces often carry a refined delicacy, with bright pops of color and intricate forms. Underlying her work is also an act of ripping and tearing that could be seen as inherently aggressive. She sees parallels between these conflicting elements of the work’s appearance, process, and emotional content.

María Berrío, Phobos (2024). © María Berrío. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.

“There is a lot of tearing,” she said. “I am putting this world together piece by piece. It’s similar to the way I think. I am piecing ideas from reality, imagination, everything I see and feel. When you look at these works there is a chaotic feeling that sometimes leads to abstraction and it’s similar in my head. My ideas are chaotic and very emotional. I think you also see the care and love that I put into it. It’s wonderful to be able to do this and express these emotions. Figures appear, they disappear, compositions change. I see, observe, and find them. I remember a mentor who told me that your aim as an artist is to touch another world. You must do this by being patient.”

María Berrío, El Dorado (2024). © María Berrío. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.

Women and children usually take a central position in Berrío’s pieces. She says she began to explore migration as a central idea in her work during Donald Trump’s first term, responding to his separation of mothers and their children at detention centers near the U.S.-Mexico border from 2018. The figures in her pieces are often shown as casualties of larger forces, pushed and buffeted by a careless patriarchal system. For this series, the artist has shifted her focus from migration as a key theme, but significant residues remain.

Berrío mentions the characters from previous pieces who have found their way into these new works, a form of migration through space and time. The personal experiences, mythologies, and histories of her characters all become blended together, finding themselves displaced into unfamiliar scenes. “It feels like all these characters come and go,” said the artist, who was born in Colombia and now lives in New York. “Migration has bled into a lot of bodies of work. This sense of displacement is always present, the idea of living here but not being from here. As an immigrant, I think about that often.”