Victoria Miro will open Send in the Clowns on 8 October, the first solo exhibition of Khalif Tahir Thompson's work at the gallery since it announced his representation. Ten new paintings go on view at the Wharf Road space in London through 7 November, marking the Brooklyn-based artist's debut solo presentation with the gallery. Thompson builds his large canvases around domestic life, treating relatives, neighbours and imagined figures with the same close, patterned attention. For this show he has drawn on his own upbringing in Brooklyn's Canarsie neighbourhood — the youngest of four children, raised in public housing — and on a family photo archive he first explored during the pandemic, after boxes of albums belonging to his late grandmother resurfaced from sixteen years in storage. The exhibition borrows its title from Stephen Sondheim's 1973 ballad, and the artist has framed the phrase as a way of naming how humour gets deployed to cover vulnerability — a response, he has said, to hardship and loss, including his father's death when Thompson was twelve. That idea plays out across scenes of everyday Black life in New York: a braiding salon facade rendered in detail, a closed Canarsie diner at night, a young man pushing a stroller past a playground. Oil, acrylic, handmade paper and materials like pleather are layered into collage-like surfaces, and the compositions mix relatives with strangers across generations. The show opens with a private view on the evening of 7 October, and Thompson will lead an artist talk with afternoon tea on 13 October. The gallery is also carrying his work to Frieze London later this month, where it presents at booth D12 from 14 to 18 October.