Private ViewingRVIP Members
Pia Camil
Bestia
It is a pleasure to welcome you and your fellow RVIP members to Elizabeth Xi Bauer this Sunday for a viewing of our current exhibition, Pia Camil: Bestia.
Pia Camil
Date
Sunday 1st November 2026
Time
1:00pm
Venue
Elizabeth Xi Bauer, 20–22 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QE
The afternoon will begin with a brief introduction to the gallery, our curatorial approach and how we work with collectors. Our gallery team will then guide you through the exhibition, offering insight into the artists and their work.
The afternoon will also include refreshments and an opportunity to speak with the team, ask questions and discuss the art market in a relaxed and informal setting.
The Exhibition: Pia Camil, Bestia
Curated by Maria do Carmo M.P. de Pontes, Bestia is Pia Camil's first solo exhibition in London and her first presentation with the gallery.
The exhibition explores desire as a source of vitality and power. Through a series of new paintings and a major sculptural work, it reframes the cultural assumptions and shame long attached to female sexuality. The title is deliberately ambiguous: in Spanish, bestia can signify both exceptional prowess and something untamed or animal.
At the centre of the gallery stands The beast (Lady Godiva), a monumental inflatable sculpture more than five metres long and Camil's first work in this medium. Lady Godiva and her horse merge into a single larger-than-life figure, part mythological heroine, part unruly presence. The work revisits a legend long tied to spectacle and stigma, in which the townspeople shuttered their windows and “Peeping Tom” was struck blind for looking.
That idea of looking runs through the paintings, which Camil sets within working wooden shutters. Each canvas becomes a threshold between public and private, and the viewer must choose to open it and look in. To heighten the effect, the gallery's street frontage has been screened with a wooden wall, so visitors step into something usually kept private.
The Artist
Pia Camil (b. 1980, Mexico City) trained at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Slade School of Fine Art, London. She has had solo presentations at the New Museum and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Nottingham Contemporary, Tramway in Glasgow, and the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City. She has also shown at Desert X and the Aichi Triennale. Her work is held in major public collections including the Centre Pompidou, the Guggenheim, La Colección Jumex and the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art.
In the Press
We are delighted that Bestia has received a four-star review in The Guardian, which named it one of five free exhibitions to see and described Camil as an artist “so obviously and totally devoted to pleasure, hedonism and joy.”
Critic Paul Carey-Kent has also named Elizabeth Xi Bauer FAD Magazine's Gallery of the Month, highlighting Bestia and our international programme.
About Elizabeth Xi Bauer
Founded in 2015, Elizabeth Xi Bauer began as a curatorial platform presenting focused exhibitions, before opening its first permanent gallery in Deptford in 2021. In 2025 the gallery opened in Exmouth Market, Clerkenwell, now the home of its exhibition programme, while the Deptford space serves as a studio for invited artists. The gallery collaborates with artists, curators and institutions across São Paulo, Amsterdam, Brussels and Lisbon. Works by gallery artists are held in public collections including Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum.
Our approach is built on close, long-standing relationships with artists and collectors, and on placing artistic practice within museum, curatorial and critical contexts.
Bestia runs until 22nd November 2026. If you have any questions before Sunday, or any access requirements, please do not hesitate to contact me directly on the details below.
I look forward to welcoming you on Sunday.