On View

A new public sculpture by Gerhard Richter has been unveiled at Serpentine South in Kensington Gardens. At 92, the celebrated German artist has never stopped experimenting with a range of media and has now created a towering monument based on his Strip Paintings series, which he began in 2010.
Those works played with the possibilities of reproduction by taking a digitally altered photograph of the much earlier Abstract Painting 724-4 (1990) and splicing it into thousands of thin vertical strips that were then reassembled horizontally and placed behind perspex. In this way, the original image is in some sense preserved and yet transformed beyond all recognition.
The painting ‘Strip’ by Gerhard Richter on display at Lenbachhaus in Munich, Germany, 06 May 2013. Photo: Felix Hoerhager/picture alliance via Getty Images.
The idea of continually reflecting, rearranging, and repeating a series of simple units to create an endless array of possible new patterns, most recently explored in Strip-Tower, also defined “4900 Colours,” Richter’s 2008 exhibition at Serpentine. In this case, the artist used elements of chance to compose 25 brightly colored tiles into lively grid formations, of which 49 were exhibited.
Gerhard Richter, STRIP-TOWER (2023) © 2024, Gerhard Richter, Prudence Cuming Associates.
The idea has been inspired by Richter’s design for the south transept window of Cologne Cathedral, which was destroyed during World War II and replaced in 2007 with 11,500 squares of glass in 72 colors.
German artist Gerhard Richter at the opening of “4900 Colours” at the Serpentine Gallery, Kensington, central London. Photo: Dominic Lipinski – PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images.
This is not the first time that Serpentine has made use of its verdant surroundings in Kensington Gardens to display public artworks. Just a year after its launch in 1971 it hosted Blow Up ’71, an outdoor exhibition of inflatable and kinetic sculptures. Since then it has continued to present significant works in collaboration with The Royal Parks, like Anish Kapoor’s Sky Mirrors in 2010 and The London Mastaba, a mammoth installation by Christo on Serpentine Lake in 2018.
Gerhard Richter, STRIP-TOWER (2023) © 2024, Gerhard Richter, Prudence Cuming Associates.
“Strip-Tower is a three-dimensional manifestation of themes and methods that underpin Richter’s historic practice in painting, repetition, improvisation and chance,” said Serpentine’s CEO Bettina Korek and artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist, in a joint press statement.
“Gerhard Richter: Strip-Tower” is on public view in Kensington Gardens until October 27, 2024.
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Expo Chicago, the Windy City’s marquee art fair, just closed on Sunday, after bringing more than 170 exhibitors to the famous Navy Pier on Lake Michigan. The event drew even more attention than usual, since it was acquired by Frieze last summer, and galleries all over town opened major new exhibition amid the festivities. Here are five that are not to be missed.
“McArthur Binion and Jules Allen: Me and You” at Gray Chicago
Through May 31, 2024
McArthur Binion, Handmadeness:two (2023). Image courtesy Gray Gallery.
Artists McArthur Binion and Jules Allen have been friends since the early 1980s, when they met in New York as members of a circle of Black avant-garde musicians, writers, and artists, but this show marks the first time their work has been presented together. Binion is debuting 11 new paintings alongside photographs by Allen. Binion’s new series, “Handmadeness,” delves into the lexicon of what he terms the “under conscious,” visual markers of his identity collected in a repeating, interwoven grid. He uses copies of his birth certificate and his address book, as well as photographs of himself, his hand, his father, and mother. Allen, a New York-based photographer and Kamoinge Workshop member who was a protégé of Roy DeCarava, is showing series from the 1980s to present.
“Shinique Smith: METAMORPH” at Monique Meloche Gallery
Through May 18
Shinique Smith, Midnight in my garden (2024). Image courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery.
Shinique Smith has become famous for her monumental, totem-like fabric sculptures and abstract paintings that embrace calligraphy and collage. She says they’re inspired by her “magical childhood experiences,” like chanting with the Dalai Lama, tagging in a graffiti crew in Baltimore, and going to fashion shows with her mother in Paris and New York. The show, her first with Monique Meloche, introduces a series of new large-scale paintings that incorporate fabric, brocades, and embroideries that produce a burst of color, light, and motion. Smith says of the work: “Unfolding, unraveling, and dancing around the perimeter of the gallery, the paintings are a reminder that everything is in motion and constantly evolving.”
“Lorraine O’Grady: The Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel” at Mariane Ibrahim Gallery
April 10-May 25, 2024
Lorraine O’Grady, Announcement Card 2 (Spike with Sword, Fighting), 2020. Image courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago, Paris, and Mexico City) © 2024 Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Lorraine O’Grady’s first solo exhibition with Mariane Ibrahim also marks the first time she has focused fully on her most recent artistic persona, the character of the Knight, or “Lancela Palm-and-Steel.” The Knight made its first appearance in the artist’s 2021 retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, four decades after the creation of her most famous avatar, “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire,” who confronted the prevailing racial segregation of the New York art world through unannounced performances at public art events. The Knight—along with Pitchy-Patchy, her squire, and Rociavant, her horse—is on a mission to finish what her predecessor started. However, this avatar’s identity is concealed within a suit of armor made in the style of a conquistador.
“Jamal Cyrus + Harold Mendez: On turning ground” at Patron Gallery
Through June 1, 2024
Jamal Cyrus, Signal (2023). Photo: Evan Jenkins. Image courtesy Patron Gallery, Chicago.
This two-person exhibition—the gallery’s second presentation with Jamal Cyrus and its third with Harold Mendez—combines new bodies of work in sculpture, drawing, textile, and sound. Cyrus’s expansive practice draws on collage and assemblage, and explores the evolution of African American identity within the context of Black political movements and the African diaspora. Mendez, who was born in Chicago and is now based in Los Angeles, was part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and is known for two- and three-dimensional works that feature rich textures and multilayered surfaces that result from labor-intensive processes.
“John Chamberlain: Black Mountain Poems” and “Richard Wetzel: Some Must Watch, Paintings 1983-85” and “Damon Locks, Terri Kapsalis, Wayne Montana, Rob Shaw Noon Moons,” at Corbett vs. Dempsey
Through April 27, 2024

Corbett vs. Dempsey is offering three separate presentations. John Chamberlain’s Black Mountain College poems, composed during his time at the fabled institution in the mid-1950s and displayed here in typewritten form, are sure to be a revelation for those who know him only for his crushed-metal sculptures. Meanwhile, Richard Wetzel, a member of the Chicago Imagists, is showing mid-1980s paintings and prints of “original biomorphic creations—monstrous forms in eerie, opalescent hues with monochromatic backgrounds,” according to the gallery.
Last but not least, the gallery is showing in its “Vault” space a collaborative video, Noon Moons, with a remarkable backstory. In 2012, musician Damon Locks and writer Terri Kapsalis were each commissioned by Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio to create pieces in response to the ESS Sun Ra/Alton Abraham archive. They decided to team up on a sound work and invited Wayne Montana, Locks’ colleague in the Eternals, to help. After they finished, they had animator Rob Shaw create accompanying visual element. The final work, clocking in at 17 minutes and 30 seconds, incorporates elements of Sun Ra’s philosophy via spoken word—a worldview that is “simultaneously bleak and optimistic,” as the gallery put it in a statement.
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Madonna is dominating the Miami headlines this week, with a run of blockbuster concerts. (After the first two sold out, a third was added for tonight.) However, the renowned icon’s first son, Rocco Ritchie, is also making waves in the Magic City right now.
That’s because Ritchie, a talented painter, is prepping a two-day pop-up exhibition. Titled “Pack a Punch,” it will features new paintings and be on view Wednesday and Thursday, April 10 and 11, at 30 NE 40 Street in Miami’s Design District. (Its organizer, dealer Jessica Draper, said walk-ins are welcome on Thursday; otherwise, viewings are only by appointment.)
Born in Los Angeles in 2000, Ritchie studied at Central Saint Martins and the Royal Drawing School in London, where he currently lives and works. In his new works, Ritchie, who cites Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon as major sources of inspiration, is continuing his exploration of the human figure. This presentation follows “Lovers and Enemies,” a solo show of Ritchie’s work in London last fall, where he showed portraits of his friends and family. That one was curated by David Dawson, formerly Freud’s studio manager.
Ritchie’s parents (his father is film director Guy Ritchie) have been enthusiastic supporters of his painting practice, and his work is in the collections of fashion designers Stella McCartney and Donatella Versace and dealer Lorcan O’Neill, among others.
Artnet caught up with Ritchie on the eve of his opening to ask about his training, his inspirations, and his early years operating under a pseudonym.
Rocco Ritchie, Rick and Mick, (2024). Photo by Brooke D’Avanzo
When and why did you first pick up a paintbrush?
I’ve been painting since I was a small kid. It is something that always caught my attention and gave me a place to escape.
Did you have formal training?
I went to Central Saint Martins, but I developed my draftsmanship at the Royal Drawing School in London. I studied there for a few years.
Your paintings are figurative, bold, and almost expressionist, with an intriguing palette. Who are some of your biggest influences?
My influences have changed over the course of time, and what is happening in my life informs which artists I am looking at. Recently I’ve been focusing on British painters over the past 100 years or so, such as Bacon, Freud, Auerbach, and David Hockney. For this show, I was particularly inspired by Frank Auerbach’s show at the Courtauld; the black and white charcoal works on paper.
Rocco Ritchie, Broken Jeff, (2024). Photo by Brooke D’Avanzo
Can you tell us about the pseudonym, “Rhed,” that you went by initially?
Rhed was something I came up with to go under the radar in the first few years of making work. It doesn’t hold much deep meaning behind it, I just liked the way it sounded. I tried to go along with it for as long as I could, but word eventually got out.
Were you wanting to stay anonymous and/or were you unhappy about being identified?
I’m proud of who I am and where I’ve come from, but I know people would have judged me aggressively in my early stages if I came out with my name. I wanted to develop technically before showing under my name.
Do you work with a particular gallery or someone who handles the sales of your work?
As of now I am working with [art dealer] Jessica Draper. I’ve worked with galleries in the past, I’m just waiting to find the right one.
Who are some of your favorite artists whether historical or contemporary?
My favorite artists vary from Leonardo da Vinci, to Rembrandt, to Paula Rego. Contemporary wise, I really like the work of Joseph Yaeger and Lens Geerk.
“Rocco Ritchie: Pack a Punch” is on view at 30 NE 40 Street in Miami on Wednesday and Thursday.
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Isabel Sullivan seems too young to be called a veteran of the gallery scene, but she has nonetheless spent the last decade working in New York galleries, most recently as a partner at Chase Contemporary.
Now, Sullivan, 33, has struck out on her own with an eponymous space on Lispenard Street in the fast-growing Tribeca gallery scene.
“Opening my own space wasn’t necessarily something that I always dreamed about,” she said in an interview. “The move happened organically, as I began to grow and develop an understanding and a vision for the type of gallery and organization I wanted to create. I wanted to show work I believed in.”
Installation view of “New Realism” group show at Isabel Sullivan Gallery in Tribeca. Image courtesy Isabel Sullivan Gallery.
Her gallery’s inaugural show, which opened on March 14, is “New Realism: Looking Forward and Back,” which was curated by the storied SoHo artist Neil Jenney, who shot to fame a half-century ago with his “Bad Paintings.”
Jenney has included some of his recent work, as well as pieces by Elisa Jensen, Victor Leger, Joseph Santore, Mercer Tullis, and Frank Webster. A few of those figures are connected: Santore, for instance, taught both Jensen and Webster. Sullivan has filmed mini-documentaries about each artist. (More good news for Jenney fans: he will open a solo show with Gagosian on West 24th Street in West Chelsea on May 2.)
Isabel Sullivan at her new gallery in Tribeca. Image courtesy Isabel Sullivan Gallery.
“New Realism” includes roughly 30 works and aims to explore what “Realism” is today. They include Jenney’s skyscapes with sculptural frames and Jensen’s shadowy but vibrant interiors. Santore’s existential paintings reflect on the human condition, while Tullis’s striking graphite works have a meditative air to them. Webster and Leger’s paintings add a serene touch to the affair.
Sullivan met Jenney when she accompanied a friend to his studio. “When I first entered the space, I felt as if I had walked into a museum,” she said. She was taken not only by Jenney’s work, but also with a permanent exhibition he had on view of different Realist artists. “Neil gave me a tour and told me about the group exhibition he had organized, ‘American Realism Today’ at the New Britain Museum of American Art” in Connecticut, in 2022, she explained.
Joseph Santore, Empty Lot (2022–23). Image courtesy the artist and Isabel Sullivan Gallery.
Jenney was interested in organizing a subsequent edition at a commercial gallery. “It felt fated to me at that moment,” said Sullivan, adding, “I had been thinking about the return of figurative painting, and its prevalence, and in particular that there was something fundamentally radical in such a return—and that Realism had first emerged, and then continually re-emerged following profound shifts or ruptures in society, and culture.”
Sullivan and her gallery started a search for artists in New York who were working in this mode, and found numerous artists who were included in his New Britain Museum show. “From there, the whole show began to truly take shape,” she said.
Elisa Jensen, Lace Curtain (Limits of the Diaphane), 2014. Image courtesy the artist and Isabel Sullivan Gallery.
As for landing in Tribeca, Sullivan said she initially came close to taking a space in Chelsea, but “there was something about the energy down here in Tribeca that really moved me. It felt spirited and lively—like the future, and my future was here.”
Sullivan says she’s glad she ultimately steered away from some of the “typical white box spaces” she looked at. The location she chose, formerly the home of the now-closed Denny Gallery, “felt cozy and intimate, which was the vibe I was going for,” she said. “It gave me the feeling that I hoped others would feel in the future when they visit us.”
The facade of the new Isabel Sullivan Gallery at 39 Lispenard Street in Tribeca. Image courtesy Isabel Sullivan Gallery.
“New Realism: Looking Forward and Back” runs through Sunday, April 21, at Isabel Sullivan Gallery, 39 Lispenard Street.
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As Women’s History Month comes to a close, run—don’t walk—to see the latest iteration of the “Every Woman Biennial,” which is as dynamic, fascinating, and just plain fun as ever. The show, formerly known as the Whitney Houston Biennial and now in its fifth edition, closes Sunday.
The female and non-binary art festival features 200 contemporary artists whose works are hung in a salon-style exhibition, as well as a slate of performances. The 2024 exhibition’s title, “I Will Always Love You,” continues its homage to Whitney Houston’s music, and includes work by stars like Michele Pred, Pussy Riot/Nadya Tolokonnikova, Phoebe Legere, Swoon, and many more.
Image courtesy Every Woman Biennial
The wide-ranging material on view includes paintings, prints, textiles, and video. Pred’s eye-catching Love as Activism (2022), a neon-red heart surrounding a pink fist, lights up La MaMa’s street window and is visible to passersby. Pussy Riot/Nadya Tolokonnikova’s Holy Squirt (2023) is a pink and glittered take on a holy water fountain, inviting all to be “conceptually baptized” in the Holy Rainbow Church of Matriarchy (matriarchy is a theme explored by several artists in the show).
A dedicated section of the gallery also includes specially created (and very affordable) talismans by each artist that in many cases derive from or expand on the nearby works, many of which have already found buyers.
The show, which launched on March 2 and drew an opening night crowd of roughly 2,000, is marking its closing weekend with high-energy performances with music, dancers from the Metropolitan Opera, and a mixed-reality “rock opera” from Erin Ko and Kanami Kusajima.
Pussy Riot/ Nadya Tolokonnikova, Holy Squirt, (2023) at the Every Woman Biennial.
The show is co-curated by a team that includes founder C. Finley, executive director and producer Molly Caldwell, artistic director Eddy Segal, and gallery and production manager Jerelyn Huber.
When the show started in 2014, it was an organic response to create a place for women artists not being equally represented in exhibitions and biennials.
C. Finley was asked by friends what she would do if she ran a biennial and she responded: “I’d make it all women!” Segal had the idea to name it the Whitney Houston Biennial. A one-night show  was organized in which women came together in a Brooklyn loft, hung their artworks, and made impromptu performances for hundreds of friends and fans.
Kariny Padilla, Guilty of Nothing (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and Every Woman Biennial.
Two years later, the show was timed to coincide with the Whitney Biennial, and was expanded to a full exhibition of women and non-binary artists in a downtown gallery, with work selected from an open call. The event have continued to be presented in New York since then and has expanded to sister cities—Los Angeles in 2019 and London in 2021.
Identity and gender fluidity, social and racial justice, women’s rights, and flipping the stereotypes of “women’s work” are focuses of many of the artists’ pieces, which provide representations of their daily lives, bodies, desires, and traumas. Many also immortalize those they cherish—friends, lovers, mothers, grandmothers, mentors, and icons.
The show continues through Sunday March 24 at La MaMa Galleria at 47 Great Jones Street, New York.
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Early Netherlandish painters of the 1400s pioneered portraits as highly detailed, distinctive records of an individual. Two centuries later, artists of the Dutch Golden Age made these faces come alive with an expressive, characterful twist. This genre of smirks, pouts, glowers, and gapes was dubbed the “tronies.”
“Turning Heads,” a survey of “tronies” that features works by world famous Old Master painters like Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens, and Johannes Vermeer, recently opened at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. Some examples of the genre that will be familiar with audiences include Rembrandt’s The Laughing Man (1629–30) and Vermeer’s Girl with the Red Hat (ca. 1665–67).
Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Red Hat (ca. 1665–67). Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
This small jewel painted on panel from Vermeer’s limited oeuvre has a particularly spontaneous air, as though the subject has turned with surprise to see us enter the room. Though no amount of ravishing detail is spared on the rich textures of the woman’s hat and shawl, her face stands out for its strikingly lifelike, everywoman familiarity.
Circle of Rembrandt van Rijn, The Man with the Golden Helmet (ca. 1650). Courtesy of Gemäldegalerie Berlin.
Rather than rely on descriptive documents of a specific sitter that may or may not be saved for posterity, intimate studies of human subjects could be used to capture fleeting interior states with universal resonance. The private contemplation tinged with anguish on this elder man’s face provides an interesting counterpoint to the obviously impressive glimmering gold of his helmet.
Rembrandt van Rijn, Interior with Figures (1628). Courtesy of National Gallery of Ireland.
A rare genre scene attributed to Rembrandt, Interior with Figures is a dimly lit work that contains an ambiguous confrontation between a group, in which narrative depth is provided by the the expressions and gestures exhibited by the central figures. Across the canvas, we can variously read defiance, shock, confusion, and shame.
Michael Sweerts, Head of a Woman (ca. 1654). Courtesy of J. Paul Getty Museum.
The Brussels-born Flemish painter Michael Sweerts worked in many places, including Persia (now Iran) and Goa, India. In his mid-twenties, he moved to Rome for nearly a decade, joining a movement of fellow Dutch and Flemish genre painters known as the Bamboccianti for their shared interest in everyday scenes of peasant life and people living on the margins of society. Erring from caricature, Head of a Woman is empathetic painting of a humble woman captures some of her vulnerability through its careful depiction of her weathered features, toothless grimace, and teary eyes.
Peter Paul Rubens, Head of a Bearded Man (c. 1612). Photo courtesy of Princely Collections Liechtenstein, Vienna.
With the invention of “tronies,” artists of the Dutch Golden Age and Flemish Baroque era were able to get creative, experimenting with technical skills to bring about fun visual effects. In this way, they also discovered the capacity of painting to materialize otherwise abstract, intangible notions like emotions, age, wisdom, or fragility. Explorations and introspections like these would have a lasting influence on modernism.
Michael Sweerts, Head of a Woman (ca. 1654). Photo courtesy of Leicester Museum & Gallery.
“Turning Heads: Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer” is on view at the National Gallery of Ireland until May 26, 2024. 
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Damien Hirst has brought his infamous preserved animal carcasses and shiny Mickey Mouse sculptures to the sloping hills of southern France. “Damien Hirst: The Light That Shines” at Château La Coste presents a sweeping survey of around 90 of the YBA artist’s historic and recent artworks.
Nestled in one of the country’s oldest winemaking regions near Aix-en-Provence, the 500-acre vineyard has been converted into a hotel and a destination for contemporary art. Hirst’s show marks the first time a single artist has had full run of the compound.
“Amid laughs and giggles, chats and cups of tea, great ideas evolved as they do when Damien is his playful self,” said the institution’s founder, the property tycoon and hotelier Paddy McKillen. “He has planned out the show to perfection. He has conceived each element to compliment both art and architecture, all set amongst Cezanne’s Provençal landscape.”
Works from the “Natural History” series at “Damien Hirst: The Light That Shines” at Château La Coste, March 2–June 23, 2024. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd, © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2024.
Over a multi-decade career, Hirst has produced more than enough work to fill the site’s five unique architectural pavilions. The dead animals preserved in formaldehyde for which he is most notorious are being exhibited in a pavilion by Italian starchitect Renzo Piano. Early attention-grabbing examples from the “Natural History” series, as well as their multi-million dollar price tags, catapulted Hirst into the public eye in the 1990s.
Pieces from Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable at “Damien Hirst: The Light That Shines” at Château La Coste, March 2–June 23, 2024. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd, © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2024.
Another pavilion, designed by the late Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, showcases Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelieveable (2017), which was originally debuted by the Pinault Foundation at the 57th Venice Biennale. These works are all imagined as the heavily patinated, coral-encrusted treasures retrieved from a fantastical ancient shipwreck off the coast of East Africa.
Flower paintings at “Damien Hirst: The Light That Shines” at Château La Coste, March 2–June 23, 2024. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd, © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2024.
Elsewhere, garishly colored flowers from The Secret Gardens Paintings series will be familiar to anyone who checked out Gagosian’s booth at Frieze London last year. As flower paintings go, the works provoked some fiercely mixed reactions and seemed to set the tone for a turn towards whimsical escapism in contemporary art. Butterflies, a common motif in Hirst’s work, also appear many times over in the swirling red kaleidoscopes of The Empress Paintings. 
Hirst has also made good use of the château’s ample outdoor space to stage mammoth sculptural works. The 21-foot painted bronze sculpture Temple (2008) resembles a male torso as one might have seen in biology class at school. Successive cut-away sections of the body allow us to glimpse the figure’s organs and musculature. Charity (2002), which once stood beside The Gherkin in London, wryly takes an old charity collection box and turns it into a monument, but one that has evidently been ransacked and its coins seized.
Outdoor sculpture at “Damien Hirst: The Light That Shines” at Château La Coste, March 2–June 23, 2024. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd, © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2024.
As part of the château’s ever-evolving sculpture park program, McKillen also regularly commissions new site-specific works. Hirst has dreamed up a chapel that will take the form of a 100-foot-high bronze hand pointing skywards.
“I designed this arm as a sculpture. It was based on a hand holding a mobile phone. But it was a bit like Christ’s fingers,” Hirst said. “And then I thought, it’s like a spire. It was Paddy’s idea to put steps inside it so you could go up it.” The chapel is scheduled to open in 2025.
The holy hand joins an array of high-profile permanent installations that dot the rolling vineyards and wooded walking trails of the property, including works by artists and architects like Louise Bourgeois, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tracey Emin, and Sophie Calle.
“Damien Hirst: The Light That Shines” is presented by HENI. It is on view at Château La Coste until June 23, 2024.
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Since the very earliest art forms, artists have been compelled to depict the human figure. These images allow us to see ourselves, our societies, and our cultures reflected back and recorded for posterity. “The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black figure” is a new survey at the National Portrait Gallery in London that considers how 22 artists from the African Diaspora are currently choosing to reflect the Black experience.
Some of the biggest names on show include Kerry James Marshall, Amy Sherald, Michael Armitage, and Lubaina Himid, and all of the works were completed at some point in the past two decades. The exhibition was initiated by Ekow Eshun, the writer, broadcaster, and curator behind the Hayward Gallery’s hit show “In the Black Fantastic” in 2022.
At the “The Time is Always Now” opening, Eshun explained that the exhibition’s title comes from “an awareness that we’re in an extraordinary moment right now, a moment of flourishing when it comes to work by contemporary artists from the African Diaspora working in figuration.”
“These works are thinking about a history of being overlooked, misrepresented, or depicted without agency,” he added. “These works are not a rectifier of that, per se. These artists are simply commanding space on their own terms.”
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Father Stretch My Hands (2021). Photo: Rob McKeever, courtesy of Gagosian.
The show’s first of three themes, “Double Consciousness,” borrows its title from the great thinker W.E.B. Du Bois, who used the term in 1897 to encapsulate the Black experience of living within a white society but also outside, psychologically speaking.
“It is a peculiar sensation, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” Du Bois once remarked. If this feeling can be translated to canvas, it might resemble the fragmented portraits of Nathaniel Mary Quinn, which remind us that our perceptions of the world around us are never static or entirely coherent. His beguiling works are among the best on show.
Claudette Johnson, Standing Figure with African Masks (2018). Photo: Andy Keate, courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London.
Out of a handful of sensitive and warm character studies, Jennifer Packer’s intimate portraits of family and friends attract the eye for how her painterly apparitions appear to almost melt or drip away. Claudette Johnson’s Standing Figure with African Masks (2018) offers a fun twist on one of the defining images of the avant-garde, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907).  Johnson takes the West African Dan masks Picasso appropriated in his seminal 20th century painting and reclaims them as the backdrop for an assertive image of herself that she had originally planned to name Brazen Woman. By the entrance, gleaming under the gallery lights, is a towering gold monument to the Black figure, a young woman in sportswear by Thomas J. Price.
Titus Kaphar, Seeing Through Time 2 (2018). Photo: Christopher Gardner, courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.
The white gaze that has dominated so much of the art historical canon is sidelined in a series of galleries dedicated to the theme “Persistence of History.” Titus Kaphar takes to task a staple portrait set-up from the colonial era, that of a Black boy attending to a white female sitter. In his standout work Seeing Through Time 2, the central subject of Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth is removed and the boy instead kneels in reverence to a Black figure who fills the empty silhouette.
Barbara Walker’s drawings similarly foreground the Black servants or enslaved people that had been historically relegated to the status of background figures, filling them in with graphite while those who were once considered to be the composition’s obvious subjects are merely suggested by an embossed outline.
Jordan Casteel, Yvonne and James (2017). Photo: Adam Reich, courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York.
Finally, the theme of “Our Aliveness” unites works by artists like Toyin Ojih Odutola, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, and Henry Taylor, that display a sense of contemporary community. Jordan Casteel places the spotlight on everyday, easily overlooked passengers riding the New York City subway; in this case the sitters are James, who sells vintage vinyl records, and his friend Sylvia, who runs a soul food restaurant in Harlem. Meanwhile, Hurvin Anderson’s colorful yet subtly understated paintings center the barbershop as a site of kinship for people of Caribbean origin in Britain.
Denzil Forrester, Itchin & Scratchin (2019). Photo: Mark Blower, courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery.
The exuberance of a crowd that fills a dimly lit but lively reggae dancehall in London in the 1980s practically leaps off the canvas in a work by Denzil Forrester. Opposite, the dense layering of imagery in Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s Still You Bloom in This Land of No Gardens (2021) is masterfully achieved so as to never detract from the principal composition. A self-portrait of the artist with her child, the work is immediately striking long before the viewer steps closer and drinks in the intricate patterns and archival photographs imprinted onto the scene’s lush foliage.
“The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure” is on view at the National Portrait Gallery in London through May 19, 2024. 
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