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Featuring Derrick Adams, Lyle Ashton Harris, Huma Bhabha, Ahmed Morsi, Ruby neri, Robert Pruitt and Richard Wyatt Jr.
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Ahmed Morsi
B. 1930Ahmed Morsi's acclaimed oeuvre includes visionary paintings, stage sets, and the acclaimed avant-garde magazine Galerie ’68—a publication that became the voice of the new Arabic modernism. In 1974 he moved from his home of Alexandria, Egypt to Manhattan where he continues to live and explore through painting and poetry the thresholds of expressive form.
In his paintings, Morsi mines Alexandria’s fabled artistic and literary history for its iconography juxtaposing it against everyday elements from New York City. Yellow Mask, 1975, and Untitled, 2015 speak to hallmark themes developed throughout the decades of his practice. Both paintings play with the themes of doubled figures and the coupling of forms, which run throughout Ahmed Morsi’s life and work. -
Ruby Neri
B. 1970Ruby Neri is known for her massive ceramic vessels of manic female bodies, these new wall works will animate these familiar figures and forms. Neri’s practice is linked to the San Francisco Bay-area Mission School and a strong lineage of artists pushing the boundaries of ceramics such as Betty Woodman, Robert Arneson, and Viola Frey. Her work maintains an unabashed embrace of “funk” and graffiti sensibilities that push new methods of depicting the female figure. With garnet red lips and bright lemon-yellow hair, the women depicted in Neri’s ceramic vessels are both fabulous and frantic
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Robert Pruitt
B. 1975Usher Board President, 2018, is a tour de force. A church usher's role is one of leadership and service, having both practical and spiritual dimensions. Pruitt has drawn this woman with great reverence on an imposing seven-foot sheet of paper, depicting the various textures of hair, flesh, and fabric with tremendous sensitivity. Her eyelids are half lowered in focused thought and her posture is perfectly straight, conveying moral rectitude. One hand is held to her chin, and she holds a pencil, indicative both of her own responsibilities and the artist's. Everything about her signals that she takes her role seriously, as does Pruitt. Into the upper bodice of the woman's dress, he quietly positions symbols of planets, the sun, and the African continent. Situating these emblems unobtrusively on her chest, he places them by her heart, emphasizing their importance while preventing them from dominating the image or pushing it into the realm of either fantasy or fiction. The drawing projects her authority and beauty, conveyed in no small part by the solidity with which Pruitt articulates the volumes of her form.
- Daniel Gerwin, The Potent Realism of Robert Pruitt's Black Portraiture, Hyperallergic, December 4, 2018
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Derrick Adams
B. 1970Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, Parents - Birthdays, Barbeques, Holidays, Baptisms : American Artist Derrick Adams has brought memories of his Baltimore childhood to life with ten new paintings which pay tribute to memory, family, history, and the dynamic city where he was raised. These paintings come together for Where I’m From, Adams first solo exhibition in his hometown of Baltimore, hosted by The Gallery in Baltimore City Hall. This venue is not without significance: at ten years old, with the encouragement of his grade-school art Teacher, Adams entered and won My Heritage Myself, a city-sponsored student art contest. His winning artwork was displayed at City Hall where he also had lunch with the mayor. Nearly thirty years later Adams has returned with ten large-scale expressionistic and vividly color paintings. Each work is inspired by a candid found family photograph, each image telling a myriad of stories: A boy running with a ball on a hot day, a grown cousin having his hair cut in the kitchen, an Aunt laughing joyously as she crosses her legs in a wicker Peacock chair. Where I’m from is Adams’ powerful commentary on the potency of memory and importance of preservation of history and heritage.
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"I RETURNED TO PORTRAITURE BECAUSE I WANTED TO DO WORKS THAT SPEAK TO PEOPLE'S SOULS AND SPIRITS, WHICH IS WHAT WE REALLY NEED NOW WITH THE TIMES WE ARE LIVING IN."
- RICHARD WYATT JR.
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Richard Wyatt Jr.
B. 1955Richard Wyatt Jr. is best known for his work that often revolves around themes such as layered history, social archaeology, and culture. Wyatt has been included in numerous exhibitions throughout his career, most recently in the 2019 exhibition Life Model: Charles White and His Students at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Wyatt's true passion is drawing and the act of mark-making. Throughout his career, Wyatt has always come back to his intricately-detailed portraits for which he is well known. Making these drawings is a meticulous, labor intensive process that requires Wyatt to slow down and contemplate every detail. For him, working on his drawings from day to day, and the meditative mindset that they require, is as important as their content.
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Lyle Ashton Harris
B. 1965Lyle Ashton Harris’s new photographic assemblages each combine two monochromatic dye sublimation prints on aluminum placed into Ghanaian fabric interjected with objects that allude to the totemic, sacred, and personal. In these works, Harris zooms in on evocative details of previous and new collages which are printed in high saturation—a process that flattens detail and intensifies both color and contrast, resulting in lush, visually stimulating images.
As with all of the works in this series, Migration Times pulls from moments that are important throughout Harris’s life. In his recombination, shifting and morphing signifiers, fragments and memories oscillate between the opaque and transparent, eluding visibility. For example, in this work the letter “D” at once represents daddy, desire, and death, as well as countless other, yet-announced connotations. Other images are more sure in their history: The New York Times cover is from the plane crash in which John F. Kennedy Jr. died; the object that Harris photographed, however, is not the newspaper itself but instead a photograph of a painting of the newspaper image. As with the central images that document and present anew Harris’s past experiences and memories, Harris materially explores his history in ways that produce new meanings, histories, and channels of access.
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Huma Bhabha
B. 1962Continuing to use landscape photographs as substrata, Bhabha has further developed the process of overpainting portraits of skulls, masks and silhouettes of human bodies against the backdrops of fragmented landscapes and man-made structures, usually devoid of human beings. Small clippings of animals from wildlife calendars – such as chimpanzees, kittens, ducklings and turtles – often find their way into these portraits.... ‘At the rate we destroy the planet, many animals are going to soon be extinct... I want to confront the broken connection with nature’, the artist, a passionate animal lover, has remarked.
What is also worth noting in these portraits is Bhabha’s fondness for cinema, evident in her composition, which uses cinematographic effects of layering and masking, where one image is placed over another so that the viewer experiences them separately and simultaneously... As a result, the viewer is able to read the work through multiple and complex lenses and discover what Tarafa enunciated as ‘the generous and the noble’ in ruins.
- Excerpt from essay by Danielle Shang for Huma Bhabha: Against
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Price List
OCTOBER 7 - 16, 2020
