re-title.com Features

GALERIE JAEGER BUCHER, Paris

Paul Wallach
Beginning to End, 2010
Wood, string, acrylic paint
227 x 197 x 115 cm
© Paul Wallach, Courtesy Galerie Jaeger Bucher, photo : Georges Poncet
 
 
PAUL WALLACH
h e r e t o f o r e 
 
February 16 to April 27, 2013
 
Approximately fifteen recent sculptures by Paul Wallach will be presented in this new exhibition entitled h e r e t o f o r e. This slightly archaic English indicates that we are in an “up to now.” It expresses a vision of history across space-time, or, as the poet Nicolas Pesquès puts it in his splendid text on the exhibition, “the support of yesterday for its continuous revival and, in this in-between which is today, the practice of a future that turns its back on nothing.”
 
These new works have a likeness in their common means of expression: rough and whitened wood, lightness despite volume, the mysterious way in which they hang naturally on the wall, held by a thread, a pin or a simple nail, resembling spatial forms filled with density varying in appearance and volume according to our own perspective. Volumes in space as much as forms filled with space, these sculptures float weightlessly thanks to their skilfully modelled architectures and geometries: they seem to be conceived from space, changing their point of perspective as they see fit in order to multiply the exploration of our sensory capacities and demonstrate how essential their exploration is for the world we are forming. By multiplying our points of view on these “sculptures that draw or drawings that sculpt, the artist enlarges the experience of our bodies. He opens up a new dimensional communication which is a daily experience for him but which goes against the grain of our ordinary habits and the conventions of our senses.” Thus these sculptures are not objects but “portions of air, voids maintained in barely discernible limits, volumes scarcely bounded, merely signified. One could almost say they are pure spaces, if such a thing could exist, models of possible space, samplings of the word volume”, according to Nicolas Pesquès.
 
 
GALERIE JAEGER BUCHER
5 & 7 rue de Saintonge
75003 Paris
France
T: +33 (0) 1 42 72 60 42
 
GALERIE JAEGER BUCHER
 
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MARC JANCOU CONTEMPORARY, New York

Ken Lum
The Mini-Mall Series
Installation view
Marc Jancou Contemporary, New York
 
 
KEN LUM
THE MINI-MALL SERIES
 
March 9 - May 4, 2013
 
Marc Jancou Contemporary is pleased to present works from Ken Lum’s Mini-Mall series for the first exhibition in its new location. Over the course of his thirty-year career, Lum has developed a large and complex body of work that focuses on the complexity of identity formation in both public and private realms. The exhibition will include works shown at the artist’s 2012 survey at the Vancouver Art Gallery as well as new pieces being presented for the first time.
 
Lum’s Mini-Mall works build upon ideas of subjectivity and community set forth in his earlier Shopkeeper (2000-2009) series, exhibited last year at Jancou in Geneva. The Shopkeeper series comprises individualized sign-like works for fictitious but plausible urban communities marked by immigration flux and economic turmoil. The Mini-Mall series calls attention to community formation within the parameters of the sign form itself. The works point to the diverse and changing ethnic and economic demographics of the neighborhoods to which they serve.
 
A primary theme of Lum’s work is the articulation of individuality within the constraints of social, political, and economic encodement. The artist is especially interested in imagining the subjectivities present behind the façade of this collective sign form. The specific community of businesses as identified by the mini-mall sign form may be nothing more than a clustering of businesses formed by happenstance. Empty spaces figure prominently in the Mini-Mall works and signify businesses that have yet to appear as well as those that have come and gone. Their precarity is expressed through the artistic trope of negation.
 
Born in 1956 in Vancouver, Canada, Lum has been exhibiting his work since the late 1970s. He has worked through a variety of media including public performances, sculptures, photographs, paintings, and installations. He was recently appointed Director of the Undergraduate Fine Arts program of the University of Pennsylvania. He is presently working on several public art commissions and is the recipient of a commission for A River Between Us, sponsored by Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, to be realized this summer.
 
 
MARC JANCOU CONTEMPORARY
24 West 57th Street, 6th floor
New York, NY 10019
T: +1 212 473 2100
 
MARC JANCOU CONTEMPORARY
 
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HAUSER & WIRTH, London

Sterling Ruby
THE POT IS HOT, 2013
Urethane, wood, metal drum, spray paint
487.7 x 113 x 175.3 cm / 192 x 44 1/2 x 69 in
© Sterling Ruby
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Robert Wedemeyer
 
 
STERLING RUBY
EXHM
 
22 March – 4 May 2013
 
Los Angeles-based artist Sterling Ruby’s interdisciplinary practice channels the conflicts between individual impulses and mechanisms of social control, American domination and decline, an engagement with irrationality and dysfunctional psychology, and its end result in upheaval. Ruby’s works act as formally charged markers and allegories for the burdens that plague contemporary existence. Entitled ‘EXHM’, the artist’s abbreviation for ‘exhumation’, Ruby’s debut exhibition with Hauser & Wirth presents an installation of new ceramics, collages, fabric and urethane sculptures.
 
The works in ‘EXHM’ are acts of autobiographical, art historical and social archaeology. Ruby has turned inward, treating his studio as an excavation site where discarded, buried and collected artworks and materials are dug up and reanimated. These new series highlight Ruby’s continued subversion of both material and content. They reveal a therapeutic process that embodies a site between creative utility and futility through the recycling of studio ephemera and misfired ceramic works.
 
In his recent ceramics, collectively titled ‘Basin Theology’, Ruby fills vessel-like forms with fractured pieces of his discarded ceramic work. The reuse of broken remnants becomes symbolic of an unburdening, a redemption of past mishaps and failures. The ceramic fragments, often resembling animal remains or pottery shards, are melded together through a process of repeated glazing and firing. The more times they are fired, the thicker and more vivid their glaze becomes, and the more charred and gouged the surfaces appear.
 
‘CDCR’, a large, poured urethane sculpture in the colours of red, white and blue reconfigures the artist’s ‘MONUMENT STALAGMITE’ sculptures. ‘THE POT IS HOT’, with its mortar and pestle-like form, is reminiscent of the artist’s earlier ceramic works.
 
When making poured urethane sculptures like ‘CDCR’, Ruby lays down pieces of cardboard to protect the studio floor. His EXHM collages take these cardboard pieces covered in urethane, dirt and footprints and reinvent them as formal compositions, which Ruby finalises by inserting pictures of burial grounds, correctional facilities, prescription packages and other objects found around the studio.
 
Ruby’s fabric collages, the BC series, repurpose rags, fabric scraps, and clothing that are then applied to a ground of bleached black denim. The fabric echoes the playful patterns of traditional quilts, specifically the quilts of Gee’s Bend, and the pop-like works of Rauschenberg or the formal compositions of Malevich. Both Ruby’s BC and EXHM series inhabit an interstitial space between painting and craft; industry and waste.
 
Ruby’s soft sculptural works will hang from the ceiling of the North Gallery, falling down into a pile on the floor. In the South Gallery, Ruby’s gaping vampire mouths line the walls; single pillowy droplets of blood cling to each fanged tooth. Ruby’s soft works take objects of comfort, such as blankets and quilts, and mould them into threatening forms, which are at once aggressive and playfully cartoonish.
 
 
HAUSER & WIRTH
23 Savile Row
London W1S 2ET
T: +44 (0)20 7287 2300
 
HAUSER & WIRTH
 
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Kavi Gupta BERLIN

Antonia Gurkovska
"The Skin I Live In"
Installation view
Courtesy of Kavi Gupta and the artist
 
 
ANTONIA GURKOVSKA
THE SKIN I LIVE IN
 
March 8 - April 20, 2013
 
Kavi Gupta BERLIN is proud to present "The Skin I Live In", a solo exhibition by Bulgarian artist Antonia Gurkovska. For Gurkovska's first exhibition in our Berlin gallery, the artist will present two interrelated series of works. First, a video, entitled "Drawing 2x2.2m" (2013), where the artist traces her own form in an act of performed drawing is shown on a small monitor in one of the gallery's front rooms. Like much of Gurkovska's painting, the video stems from a similar conceptual drive - the body as a contested territory, a site of expression and inscription. In a second series of works, Gurkovska transforms the gallery's third and largest room into an installation whose focus is four new large works done on square sheets of rubber and stretched canvas, each laid on its own plinth. Building from the artist's "Container" (2012), an installation created in our Chicago gallery last year, the installation presented here in Berlin, entitled "The Skin I Live In" (2013), will be presented as a hermetically closed interior with each wall covered in the spots of paint that have come to be emblematic of Gurkovska's work. Each of the four works - layered with a raster stencil, hand drawn lines of spraypaint, and gridded elliptical slits cut through the material - embody Gurkovska's understanding of skin as not necessarily a border between what is inside or outside, but instead like the surface or pictorial plane in the history of painting, as something permeable, porous, as a sieve or screen.
 
Antonia Gurkovska (b. 1984 in Sofia, BG) lives and works in Sofia and Chicago. Gurkovska's work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout Europe and America, some examples include "Index" (2012) at Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago, US, "Changing States Of Matter" (2012) at Brand New Gallery in Milan, IT, and "Don't Look Back In Anger" (2009) at Red House Center For Contemporary Art in Sofia, BG. Her work has been reviewed in numerous publications including Art In America (all publications 2012), Mousse Magazine, and Chicago Art Magazine. Gurkovska received her Master's Of Fine Arts Degree in Painting from The School Of The Art Instiute Of Chicago in 2011 and a Bachelor Of Fine Arts Degree in Painting from the National Academy Of Art in Sofia, Bulgaria in 2008. Gurkovska has been the recipient of numerous prestigious awards and fellowships including the George and Anne Siegel Fellowship (2011), Fulbright Scholarship (2009), and an Erasmus Student Exchange Grant (2005).
 
 
Kavi Gupta BERLIN
Kluckstraße 31
10785 Berlin
Germany
T: +49 162 800 7609
 
Kavi Gupta CHICAGO | BERLIN
 
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BISCHOFF/WEISS, London

Nathaniel Rackowe
GP05, 2013
Oak, glass, acrylic paint and fluorescent light
130 x 37 x 20 cm
Courtesy of the artist and BISCHOFF/WEISS, London
 
 
NATHANIEL RACKOWE
Reflections on space
 
14 March - 4 May 2013
 
BISCHOFF/WEISS is pleased to present Reflections on space, a solo exhibition of new sculptural work by Nathaniel Rackowe.
 
When daylight and darkness fade into each other, the city sits in half-light. Street lights flick on and off, an orange sun lifts over the skyline, neon advertising intensifies or dulls as the day turns. For a short while we exist between day and night.
 
The movement of neon in Nathaniel Rackowe's sculptures NLP3 and NLP4 reflect the city's shifting light. Transformation progresses with a gradual change in atmosphere, temperature and mood, as lights change from hot red to cool white. It's an urban light, neon, which hypnotically captures our attention, impossible to resist. Rackowe's geometric forms are almost like traffic signs warning of hazards ahead.
His materials and palette speak of buildings, street signs, construction sites: it's an urban language. Like the memoir of an artist's fascination with the city, his work comes from the streets of London, and cities visited during artist's residencies, most recently in Copenhagen, during winter where the sun barely rises during long hours of twilight. Rackowe finds unexpected moments of urban beauty, lamplight shining on concrete steps, the symmetry of stairwell windows lined up the side of an apartment block, or blank light boxes used for advertising lit up at an empty bus stop.
 
He introduces glass into this work, which modifies the urban landscape into something slicker, more complete. His sculpture GP06 stands on the floor, smoked glass rises up out of foundations made from breeze blocks. The glass, framed by strip lights, glows like windows at dusk. Concrete brings the sculpture back to elemental things, to the construction site, raw materials, which have not been forgotten in favour of the sensual qualities of light.
 
Rackowe's sculpture looks back to American minimalism, to Dan Flavin and Donald Judd. He engages with their rigorous aesthetic, and dramatic use of light: they were an early influence. But we live in confessional times, and there's a personal dimension to his sculpture that his predecessors didn't go in for. His is a reflection on contemporary life in the city, of wandering along empty streets at dawn, past construction sites where wires hang from scaffolding around skeletal buildings.
 
His glass pieces, titled from GP01 up to GP06, bring a sense of intimacy, of private spaces to his work. Sheets of glass, strip lights and wooden frames echo bathroom mirrors, our domestic life indoors rather than out on the streets. Their sleek geometric rigour is at the edge of designer cool but exposed wires and grey paint on oak roughen up the finish. They exist in between private and public, slick and raw, like the twilight place of his neon work. A hand painted vertical line wavers down the side of glass, making it function as a surface, rather than simply a transparent sheet of reflecting light. Wires snake down from a single light source, and echo the wavering lines of paint. Exposed rather than hidden, in bright colours like a high voltage warning, they remind us to be careful. These are not objects to get too comfortable with, or too close to, they might be hazardous. The geometry of each piece causes our eyes to flit between horizontal and vertical lines, of timber, glass, light and paint. Yellow, blue and red divide space with the strong urban colours of street signs, roadworks and building sites.
 
Beauty can be a tricky word particularly in contemporary art, too subjective, decorative, sensual, perhaps not clever enough. But Rackowe engages with it, he wants his work to be considered beautiful. As ever, it's not that simple, his sculpture made of raw materials found in hardware shops and builders' merchants, basic stuff, stands on the verge of a slick kind of beauty, and yet not quite.
 
Text by Hannah Duguid
 
 
BISCHOFF/WEISS
14A Hay Hill
London W1J 8NZ
T: +44 0207 629 5954
 
BISCHOFF/WEISS
 
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VAN HORN, Düsseldorf

Sabrina Fritsch, ior, 2012
Oil, acrylic on hession on cotton
60 x 47 cm
Photo: Achim Kukulies
Courtesy of the artist and VAN HORN, Düsseldorf
 
 
SABRINA FRITSCH
PORTAL OPAK
 
March 1 - April 6, 2013
 
We are pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Sabrina Fritsch (*1979) at VAN HORN.
 
The geometrical window vistas in Sabrina Fritsch's new works enable a view onto an indefinite space, which subtly attracts us and simultaneously prompts questions about what exactly is depicted on the image area. Are we situated inside or outside the room - or are we located in some sort of "interspace"? Through her open and, nevertheless, precise approach towards spatial structures, the artist conducts us into an active process of seeing and experiencing.
 
Layered coatings of paint, which are elaborately applied and then again abraded and flattened, define the the delicately nuanced image structure of her window vistas. Thereupon, Fritsch arranges geometrical signs, that are reminiscent of (window) frames consisting of shutter like, finely reticulated crossbars; through which we can vaguely see what's taking place on the other side. In some paintings she adds large, succulent shapes, which resemble the leaves of an indoor plant.
 
The window paintings unify Fritsch's interest in colour fields, materiality and structure. She moves along the edge of abstraction and figuration, between level expanse and potential depth perception and  interlinks the alleged divergent positions. The very essence of her works is the involvement  of painting in combination with the beholder's active view, which the artist very pointedly and sensitively implements.
 
 
VAN HORN
Ackerstr. 99
40233 Düsseldorf
Germany
T: +49 211 5008654
 
VAN HORN
 
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JVA at Jerwood Space, London

Sophia Starling
Installation shot in studio
Fluor red (work in progress) 2013
Oil on canvas
305cm x 300cm approx
Photography: Ben Anders. Art direction: Hyperkit
 
 
JERWOOD PAINTING FELLOWSHIPS
 
13 March – 28 April 2013 
 
ANTHONY FAROUX - SUSAN SLUGLETT - SOPHIA STARLING
 
Mentored by:
 
FABIAN PEAKE - MARCUS HARVEY - MALI MORRIS RA
 
Jerwood Visual Arts (JVA) is delighted to announce an exhibition of new work by three exceptional emerging painters, the 2013 Jerwood Painting Fellows: Anthony Faroux, Susan Sluglett and Sophia Starling.
 
This is the second edition of the Jerwood Painting Fellowships, an initiative launched in 2010, designed to provide crucial time and critical support to promising emerging painters in the early stages of their professional practice. The Fellowships offer three artists a bursary of £10,000 coupled with a year-long mentoring relationship of critical and professional development support. Anthony Faroux, Susan Sluglett and Sophia Starling were selected from over 300 applications for the outstanding quality and potential of their work, and partnered by the 2013 mentors: Fabian Peake, Marcus Harvey and Mali Morris RA, respectively.
 
Through the Jerwood Visual Arts programme of exhibitions and events, as well as their wider projects, the Jerwood Charitable Foundation is committed to supporting artists early on in their careers, placing particular value on building and developing peer and mentoring relationships. This level of support is invaluable for emerging artists, particularly within the current financial landscape of the arts. Shonagh Manson, Director of the Jerwood Charitable Foundation , comments:
 
‘The themes arising from this past year are brave ones; of risk, challenging habit and expectation and what has come before. But the careful founding of these relationships by each individual has meant that this has been possible in an environment with just the right blend of support and challenge. It’s an alchemical mix, and one each participant can take credit for creating. As a result, the works they have produced for exhibition have benefited from an intense period of focus, conversation, reflection and making. And they have risen to that challenge.’
 
Anthony Faroux’s installations are inspired by the imagination of selective memory and how objects can appear to be the residue of past experiences. To achieve this he creates composites of film, sound and painting that piece together the fragments of an image. The small works are exhibited on large panels, collage style, together with a speaker that emits everyday noises and sounds edited to become a musical composition. The small works shown collectively allows the image to be seen in its entirety without any element disappearing into the viewer’s peripheral vision.
 
Susan Sluglett exhibits five large canvases themed on a royal wedding. One of the paintings illustrates the aftermath of a raucous night out where a large, swollen foot sticks out of the top of a Georgian column, wrapped in black and yellow hazard tape. Her seemingly frenetic execution is underpinned by slick, tightly controlled compositions, reflecting in paint the same conflicting emotions of the subject matter.
 
Sophia Starling’s work explores the infinite possibilities for abstract painting in three dimensions. Through an endless process of stretching and re-stretching, she wraps long lengths of material around large wooden strains pleating sections of canvas into circles before adding paint. Once dry she begins to partially undo the canvas, revealing a richly coloured contour interrupted by darts of bare canvas that slice through the shape.
 
A group exhibition of new work will be on display as part of the JVA programme at Jerwood Space, London from 13 March – 28 April 2013 , before touring to venues within the UK, including BayArt, Cardiff and The Gallery at NUCA, Norwich.
 
An exhibition catalogue is available with a foreword written by Jessica Lack. (Jessica Lack is a freelance arts writer. She spent eleven years at The Guardian as an art critic and was deputy editor of Tate Magazine . She is currently working on a book about the saddest song in the world.)
 
The Jerwood Painting Fellowships are part of Jerwood Visual Arts (JVA), a contemporary gallery programme of awards, exhibitions and events at Jerwood Space, London and on tour nationally. Jerwood Visual Arts supports and showcases the work of talented emerging artists. It aims to make connections and provoke conversations within and across visual arts disciplines. A major initiative of the Jerwood Charitable Foundation.
 
 
JVA at Jerwood Space
171 Union Street
London SE1 OLN
T: + 44 (0) 20 7654 0171
Mon-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat & Sun 10am-3pm
 
Jerwood Visual Arts
 
Jerwood Charitable Foundation
 
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REGINAMOSCOW

Jonathan Meese
"DR. HOT-COLDBABY DE REAL TO UNREAL MONASS' LIZZARDADDY DE PARSIFAL DE UNCOLD", 2013
oil and acrylic on canvas
100 x 80 x 3.3 cm
Courtesy Regina Gallery, London & Moscow / Jan Bauer / Jonathan Meese
 
 
JONATHAN MEESE
Tropical Alaska Kid Der Molokobefehl
 
22 February - 31 March 2013
 
Art lovers this season will have the opportunity to acquaint themselves with the work of the German contemporary artist Jonathan Meese. The artist will not only completely transform the space of the Red October Gallery and also present a new installation, but will open a solo exhibition in the Regina Gallery a day later, showcasing new paintings and sculptures. He is named one of the European art world's most eccentric figures. The artist has frequently turned gallery spaces upside down with his unique performances, which he presents during exhibition openings.
 
Regina has excelled at being at the forefront of the artists work. Meese exhibited at the gallery in 2005, 2008 and 2009. 20 of his paintings, 2 series of drawings and 3 bronze and copper sculptures from 2011-2013 will be presented this time.
 
The title of the exhibition deals with the theme of The Child. According to him, childhood represents a total force, as the child has no knowledge of democracy, religion, esoterics or cynicism. Children to him are Suprematists, which the artist sees as the absolute law of nature. Meese admits that as a child himself he was convinced that reality is too weak to become the future, and felt the universal energy of art. The artist has created a unique terminolgy for the cult of art and childhood: lolitism, babyism, babyharmony. Meese carefully synthesizes images from mythology, history, depictions of legendary heroes and historical figures such as Hitler, Stalin, Marques de Sade, as well as film stars such as Marlen Ditrich and Scarlett Johansson. In his practice he is concerned with destroying the cults of political regimes and dictatorships as well as refusing to believe in religion. Art is the only possible dictatorship according to Meese, and his work is the ultimate propaganda, no matter the medium it is presented in. The artist has to step aside and wait for art to engulf everything.
 
Jonathan Meese lives and works in Germany. He is presently active in all of the artistic mediums: painting, sculpture, installations and performance. He has also worked as a theatre designer on such plays as "Noel Coward is back", presented at Tate Modern. For the Salzburg festival in 2010 Meese developed the set decorations for Wolfgang Rhim's "Dionysys" opera, and Wagner's "Parsifal" opera is due in 2016, a key part of the artists career. The set decorations and costumes will be designed by the artist. His work is in the private collections of Pompidou Centre, Saatchi Gallery, as well as various contemporary art museums in Belgium, Denmark, France, Japan and the United States.
 
 
REGINAMOSCOW
1, 4th Syromyatnichesky pereulok
105120 Moscow
Russia
T: +7 495 228 1330
 
REGINAMOSCOW
 
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ROBERTS & TILTON, Los Angeles

Noah Davis
The Missing Link 6, 2013
Oil on canvas
78.125 x 120 in (198.4 x 304.8 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA
 
 
NOAH DAVIS
The Missing Link
 
February 23 – March 30, 2013 
 
Roberts & Tilton is pleased to announce The Missing Link, an exhibition of new works by Noah Davis in his second solo exhibition with the gallery. In this new body of work, Davis broadens, and in some cases breaks open completely the narrative of black youth culture in the inner cities, creating what he terms an “alternative canon” of unfamiliar instances, broken moments, derelict conversations and strange urban stories that have at their core an essential human longing, a nearly verifiable pulse, a “beat” as it were of a broader cosmopolitan cool.
 
Davis’ paintings brim over with musical nuances and references, while others explore more concisely the complicated relationships between figures attempting to speak or share information. The colors become their own identifiable narrative trope, suggesting a civic bureaucracy, a mold that the figures attempt to break free from at every turn.
 
Noah Davis is a participating artist in Fore, currently on view at the Studio Museum in Harlem through March 10, 2013. His work has previously been seen in 30 Americans at the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, VA. Additional exhibitions include BAILA con Duende at the Watts Towers Arts Center, Los Angeles, CA and To Live and Paint in LA at the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA. Davis lives and works in Los Angeles.
 
A special exhibition at an offsite location in conjunction with The Missing Link will be announced the day of the opening at Roberts & Tilton.
 
 
ROBERTS & TILTON
5801 Washington Boulevard
Culver City
Los Angeles, CA 90232
T: 1 323.549.0223
 
ROBERTS & TILTON
 
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ZIEHERSMITH, New York

Paul Anthony Smith
Queen, 2013
unique picotage on pigment print, 29 x 24 inches
Courtesy of ZieherSmith, New York
 
 
PAUL ANTHONY SMITH
Transience
 
March 7 – April 20, 2013
 
Transience, the debut solo exhibition for Jamaican-American artist Paul Anthony Smith, features paintings and unique works on paper that speak to a search for identity that is at once autobiographical and universal.
 
Acutely aware of his status as an immigrant artist, Smith was inspired by trips back to Jamaica, as well as research into its history and that of the broader African diaspora. Interested in ideas of hierarchy, culture, and identity, both as fact and nostalgic reimagining, his sources range from his own contemporary photographs to historical images and books, such as Tropical Africa and The River Plate Republics: Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, c. 1960s Time-Life publications.
 
A bold sequence of large oil paintings and smaller painted works on paper depict Jamaican airport workers as they work, converse, and mill about the tarmac. On his most recent trip, the artist was struck by these almost invisible first ambassadors of sorts, one of many crucial aspects to his native country’s biggest industry. Rendered simply and boldly in poses summoning classic references as well as Jamaica’s famously relaxed style, the figures are elevated to epic proportions. Their bright safety vests and simple uniforms hint at a common dignity while contrasting boldly with the very dark skin hues that the artist prefers: “Their tonality casts a distinction around the surrounding environment of a piece.”
 
These painted works contrast with unique, jewel-like “picotages.” Smith uses a ceramic tool to laboriously pick away at the surface material of photographic prints, a unique technique loosely derived from an 18th century French process typically used with textiles. Though the process is purely ablative, the resultant texture creates a shimmering surface, as if flecked with glitter.
 
Smith always obscures his subjects’ faces, creating masks that further refer to tribal cultures, and sometimes continues through their entire stature.  The figures range from the formal and historically loaded to family photos and candid snapshots taken by the artist while visiting his homeland, places he has referred to as “non-tourist locations.” Thus, the floral patterning on his Jamaican Night Walkers contrasts with works like Queen, featuring Queen Elizabeth II, and Ras, which recreates a specific Kuba mask design (a tribe in the Democratic Republic of Congo), including vertical lines below the eyes representing tears of joy, passion, pain and strife to come. Both regal and regular subjects are given equal treatment: part scarification, part ceremonial veil, part hoodlum’s mask, yet always containing an element of powerful negation. Whether, first, second or third world, his subjects are united, at once beautiful, proud, and uncanny.
 
Smith was born in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica in 1988. He moved to Miami at age nine and later attended the New World School of Arts. He received his BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute in 2010, where he studied ceramics and painting. He lives and works in Kansas City, Missouri.
 
 
ZieherSmith
516 West 20th St
New York, NY 10011
T: +1 917-837-7201
 
ZieherSmith
 
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