Brooklyn-born painter Khalif Tahir Thompson makes his London solo debut this week with Send in the Clowns at Victoria Miro, running 8 October to 7 November. The show is among the Frieze-week highlights in London, where the young artist's densely worked paintings are drawing attention for their layered domestic worlds. Thompson's large canvases place figures in neighbourhood and interior scenes, built up from earthy ochres, greens and burgundies with patterned clothing and interiors, handmade paper and fabric, letters and numbers. The new works look back to the Black American aesthetics of the early 2000s and to Thompson's own Brooklyn childhood. Many begin with photographs from albums belonging to his grandmother Betty, which spent sixteen years in storage after her death; siblings and relatives appear alongside people the artist cannot identify, though he does not attempt to reproduce the photographs exactly. He borrows figures, poses and details, then constructs his own scenes around them, forming what he calls an imagined experience. The exhibition title comes from the 1973 theatrical ballad, for Thompson a metaphor for bringing in comedic relief when plans fail. He has spoken of using humour to mask vulnerability and of responding to difficulty in his upbringing, the youngest of four growing up in Canarsie, Brooklyn, and losing his father at twelve. Collaged letters and numbers embedded in the surfaces act as visual noise, bringing rhythm to the compositions rather than messages to decode. A 2024 Yale MFA graduate, Thompson has shown widely since finishing school, with solos at Zidoun-Bossuyt in Paris, Luxembourg and Dubai and a museum show at the Harvey B. Gantt Center in Charlotte. Victoria Miro announced his representation last spring, and Send in the Clowns is the gallery's first solo presentation of his work.