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Convergent Evolutions

The Conscious of Body Work

Past
Sep 10 – Oct 23, 2021
New York
Exhibition Details:

Convergent Evolutions: The Conscious of Body Work
Sep 10 – Oct 23, 2021

Gallery:

510 West 25th Street
New York

Above: Installation view, Convergent Evolutions: The Conscious of Body Work, Pace Gallery, New York
Press:

Press Release

Connect:

(opens in a new window) @pacegallery

Convergent Evolutions, an exhibition curated by Online Sales Director Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle, explores how intergenerational artists have used various instruments within their practices to grant or deny viewers the agency of viewership while also surveying the body’s response to the visual plane.

“Space is real for it seems to affect my senses long before my reason. The materiality of my body both coincides with and struggles with the materiality of space. My body carries in itself spatial properties, and spatial determinations ... Unfolding against the projections of reason, against the Absolute Truth, against the Pyramid, here is the Sensory Space, the Labyrinth, the Hole ... here is where my body tries to rediscover its lost unity, its energies and impulses, it’s rhythms and its flux.”

Bernard Tschumi as quoted in Art on My Mind: Visual Politics by bell hooks

Pace Gallery is pleased to present Convergent Evolutions: The Conscious of Body Work, an exhibition curated by Online Sales Director Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle and on view in New York from September 10 to October 23, 2021. The exhibition explores how intergenerational artists have used various instruments within their practices to grant or deny viewers the agency of viewership while also surveying the body’s response to the visual plane. Central to the presentation are the artists’ abilities to manipulate the ways that viewers interact with and experience their works. The show takes its title from a scientific term that refers to the development of similar traits in species belonging to different time periods.

The exhibition marks Boyle’s major curatorial debut at Pace. Since joining the gallery in May 2021, Boyle has spearheaded Pace’s growing NFT program. Among her recent online presentations was a showing of digitally rendered sculptures by Urs Fischer.

Spanning the entirety of Pace’s 510 West 25th Street space and featuring paintings and sculptures, Convergent Evolutions brings together emerging and established artists from within and beyond the gallery’s program. Works by 17 artists—including Anthony Akinbola, Jo Baer, Caitlin Cherry, Delphine Desane, Adrian Ghenie, Sam Gilliam, Sonia Gomes, Zhang Huan, Kylie Manning, RJ Messineo, Anna Park, Richard Pousette-Dart, Lucas Samaras, Marina Perez Simão, Kiki Smith, Chibuike Uzoma, and Rachel Eulena Williams—share a unifying consciousness despite their inherent temporal and geographic distances. Paintings by Pousette-Dart, a first-generation Abstract Expressionist and towering figure in the New York School, help situate the exhibition’s contemporary works in an art historical context. An online viewing room featuring additional works by Convergent Evolutions artists will also be on view, spotlighting two newly minted NFTs from Samaras’s 2011 XYZ series.

The artists featured in Convergent Evolutions use a multitude of devices, such as medium, technique, and installation, to drive conversations around the perception and intent in image-making. Works in the presentation challenge viewers to step outside personal narratives in search of deeper understanding. Key to many of the artists’ practices and works in the exhibition is a restless exploration of the dissection and assembly of the body. Highlights in the exhibition include Samaras’s Panorama 2/23/83 (1983), a dissected polaroid depicting an elongated vision of the artist in studio; Cherry’s Quaternion (2021), a figurative painting encased within an aluminum floor mounted frame bearing the elliptical shape of IMAX screens; Ghenie’s Untitled (2020), featuring a figure abstracted by layered shapes and gestural masses; and Williams’s Systems (2021), a series of tondos meticulously spaced out and interconnected by cotton rope made to represent an outstretched body.

Drawing through lines between contemporary and historical practices, the presentation offers investigative pairings between Samaras and Cherry; Pousette-Dart and Akinbola; Baer and Manning; Desane and Simão; Ghenie and Uzoma; Park and Zhang; and Gomes, Gilliam, and Williams. These connections naturally manifest through varying visual facilities, further supporting each artist’s individual research of the metaphysical space between their work and the viewer’s perspective.

Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola, Yellow piece CAMOUFLAGE #007 (Lemonade), 2021, durags, acrylic on wood panel, 8' × 12' 3" × 3" (243.8 cm × 373.4 cm × 7.6 cm)
Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola

Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola (b. 1991, Columbia, Missouri) is a first-generation American raised between Missouri and Nigeria, and currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Foregoing conventional approaches to painting and sculpture, Akinbola reimagines identity construction through startling original treatments of color and texture. His self-developed techniques explore the possibilities of totemic materials such as palm oil, hair brushes, and durags—fiber scarves used in maintaining Black hair. Akinbola has characterized his works as “metaphors for what a first-generation existence might look like,” and unpacks the rituals and histories separating Africa from Black America. His multifaceted compositions celebrate and reconcile diverse cultural narratives, creating multilayered artworks engaging consumption, respectability, and the commodification of Black culture.

Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola, Black piece CAMOUFLAGE #005 (Rick James), 2021, durags, acrylic on wood panel, 9' 11" × 8' 5" × 3" (302.3 cm × 256.5 cm × 7.6 cm)

Akinbola was selected for the Anderson Ranch Art Center Residency in 2017, awarded the Van Lier Fellowship in 2019, and an artist-in-residence at Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, in 2020. He has been featured in exhibitions at The Queens Museum, New York; the Verbeke Foundation, Stekene, Belgium; and The Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, Georgia, among others. Following his recent show at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, in 2020, Akinbola mounted significant solo exhibitions in early 2021 at FALSE FLAG, New York; the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin; and Night Gallery, Los Angeles, California.

Jo Baer, The Rod Reversed (Mixing Memory and Desire), 1988, Oil on canvas, 93-1/2" × 125-13/16" (237.5 cm × 319.6 cm)
Jo Baer

Jo Baer (b. 1929, Seattle, Washington) lives and works in Amsterdam. In the 1960s and 70s, Baer explored non-objectivity in her black and white hard-edge paintings as part of the New York Minimalist movement. Through the course of her move to Europe, Baer’s work shifted away from pure abstraction, gradually adding figural elements, text, images, and symbols.

Baer has been the subject of one-artist exhibitions worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1975); Van Abbe Museum, Einhaven, Netherlands (1978, 1986); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1986, 1999, 2013); the Dia Center for the Arts, New York (2002); Secession, Vienna (2008); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2013); and Camden Arts Centre, London (2015). Significant recent group exhibitions include Busan Biennale, Busan Museum of Art, Korea (2012); Sao Paolo Biennale, Brazil (2014); Selections from the Permanent Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2014); Drawing Dialogues: Selections from the Sol LeWitt Collection, The Drawing Center, New York (2016); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art (2016); Calder to Kelly, Die amerikanische Sammlung, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2017); The Absent Museum, WIELS, Brussels, Belgium (2017); and Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017). Her works are part of numerous public collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Gallery, London; and the Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main.

Caitlin Cherry

Caitlin Cherry (b. 1987, Chicago, Ilinois) is an artist based in Richmond, Virginia, who’s  multifaceted practice is comprised of painting, sculpture, and installation coalescing into articulate and alluring representations of Black femininity. Filtering these media through layers of digital manipulation, her work explores parallels between Black femme bodies, frequently commodified and positioned as sexual assets, and the seductiveness of art objects in the commercial gallery circuit. Cherry is currently Assistant Professor of Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, and the founder of the new online program Dark Study, a contra-institutional space for radical learning about art and theory. Her paintings have been exhibited at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Brooklyn Museum, Performance Space, and The Studio Museum in Harlem in New York, among other notable institutions. She is a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Fellowship Residency and Leonore Annenberg Fellowship.

Caitlin Cherry, Quaternion, 2021, oil on canvas and aluminum, 4' 10" × 8' 6" × 6' (147.3 cm × 259.1 cm × 182.9 cm)
Delphine Desane, Love, Cherish, Rest & Live, 2021, acrylic on French linen, 92-1/2" × 76" (235 cm × 193 cm)
Delphine Desane

Delphine Desane (b. 1988, Paris, France) is a painter and sculptor living and working in New York City. Born and raised in France to Haitian parents, the artist paints individuals of the African and Caribbean diaspora—majorly women, within familial contexts. Many of her portraits of women are drawn from her own experiences of motherhood and Black womanhood. Exhibitions include Black Femme: Sovereign of WAP and the Virtual Realm, Canada, New York, NY March 2021; Contemporary Domesticity, Taymour Grahne, London, UK, April 2021; CFHILL Art Space, Stockholm, Sweden, April 2020; PENSKE projects, LA; Luce Gallery, Torino, Italy; and at the POCO A POCO in Oaxaca, Mexico, 2020. Delphine first gained international momentum after her work was featured on the cover of Vogue Italia’s January 2020 issue. Her works have been acquired be the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL), Marrakech, and multiple private collections across the United States and in Europe.

Delphine Desane, La Source, 2021, acrylic and oil on linen, 81" × 127-1/2" (205.7 cm × 323.9 cm)
Adrian Ghenie, Untitled, 2020, oil on canvas, 39-3/8" × 27-9/16" (100 cm × 70 cm)
Adrian Ghenie

Adrian Ghenie (b. 1977, Baia Mare, Romania) works and lives in Berlin, Germany. Ghenie surveys and subverts historical and artistic narratives through his paintings, which aim to unearth feelings of vulnerability, frustration, or desire, and often draw on human experience and ideas of the collective unconscious. After living in Vienna from 2002 to 2004, Ghenie returned to Cluj in 2005, where he co-founded the production and exhibition space Galeria Plan B with multimedia artist and curator Mihai Pop. A critical venue for representing Romanian artists, the gallery held Ghenie’s first solo exhibition If You Open it You Get Dirty (2006). 

He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kuns, Ghent, and National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest. His work has also been featured in exhibitions at the Palazzo Grassi, François Pinault Foundation, Venice, the Tate Liverpool, the Prague Biennial, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, among others. Ghenie’s work is held in a number of public collections, including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Antwerp, the SFMOMA, and the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kuns. In 2005, Ghenie co-founded Galeria Plan B, a production and exhibition space for Contemporary Art.

Sam Gilliam

Sam Gilliam (b. 1933, Tupelo, Mississippi) lives and works in Washington, D.C. Gilliam is one of the great innovators in postwar American painting. He emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid-1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of Color School painting. 

Sam Gilliam, More Than Water (Assissi) Subtle Jungle, 1997, two elements--acrylic and polypropylene on beveled edged canvas collage and acrylic on panel construction, 73-1/2" × 98-1/2" × 9" (186.7 cm × 250.2 cm × 22.9 cm) overall

Gilliam grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, attending the University of Louisville for both undergraduate and graduate school. In addition to a traveling retrospective organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. in 2005, and installation at the Central Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale, Gilliam has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1971); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (1982); Whitney Museum of American Art, Philip Morris Branch, New York (1993); J.B. Speed Memorial Museum, Louisville, Kentucky (1996); Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2011); and Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2018), among many other institutions. A semi-permanent installation of Gilliam’s paintings opened at Dia:Beacon in August 2019. His work is included in over 50 public collections, including those of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Tate Modern, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sonia Gomes, Sem título [Untitled], 2004, stitching, bindings, different fabrics and threads on bench, 20-1/8" × 9-7/8" × 10-1/4" (51.1 cm × 25.1 cm × 26 cm)
Sonia Gomes

Sonia Gomes (b. 1948, Caetanópolis) lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. Gomes combines secondhand textiles with everyday materials, such as furniture, driftwood, and wire, to create abstract sculptures that reclaim Afro-Brazilian traditions and feminized crafts from the margins of history.

Gomes entered the Guignard University of Art, in Belo Horizonte, in 1994, after a career in Law. Sonia Gomes lives and works in São Paulo. Gomes's first solo exhibition in Europe premiered in 2019, at the Museum Frieder Burda, Salon Berlin and Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden. Her first major solo exhibition in Brazil toured in 2018, at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea of Rio de Janeiro. Her work has been exhibited in significant in the Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, UK (2021); Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2021); Revival, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (2017); New Shamans/Novos Xamãs: Brazilian Artists, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL, traveled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (2016); Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women 1947-2016, 56th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2015); Art & Textiles—Fabric as Material and Concept in Modern Art, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany (2013); A Nova Mão Afro-Brasileira, Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil (2013); and Out of Fashion. Textile in International Contemporary Art, Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Aalborg, Denmark (2013). Her work is represented in public collections worldwide including the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil; Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil; Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Muzeum Susch, Zernez, Switzerland; San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY.

Kylie Manning

Kylie Manning (b. 1983, Juneau, Alaska) is a painter and curator based in Brooklyn, NY. Kylie is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts Summa Cum Laude with a double major in Philosophy and Visual Arts. While earning a Masters from the New York Academy of Art, Manning was sent to Leipzig, Germany to exhibit and study alongside the New Leipzig School. Her training in Germany exposed her to the New Leipzig School’s version of Surrealism whose narratives she toys within her paintings. Using pure pigments dispersed with safflower and walnut oil on Belgian linen, Manning creates a whirlwind of thinly layered oil sketches that simultaneously imply and deny a narrative. Manning imbues her compositions with a feminist perspective, recontextualizing the macabre aftermath of traditionally gendered “masterpieces.”

Recent exhibitions and acquisitions include Anonymous Gallery, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hollis Taggart, New York; CG Boerner Gallery, New York; Sotheby’s, New York; Every Woman Biennial, New York; PI London, United Kingdom; Ngorongoro II, Berlin, Germany; SPRING/BREAK Art show, New York; The Sabines Museum of Contemporary Art, Tuxtla Gutierrez, Mexico; KN Gallery, Berlin; Page Bond Gallery, Richmond, Virginia; Zeedijk, Ostend, Belgium; Art-Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe Germany; StArt Fair, Paris; and the Spinnerei, Leipzig, Germany.

Kylie Manning, Squall, 2021, oil on linen, 72" × 72" (182.9 cm × 182.9 cm)
Kylie Manning, Doldrums, 2021, oil on linen, 68" × 96" (172.7 cm × 243.8 cm)
RJ Messineo

RJ Messineo (b. 1980, West Hartford, Connecticut) is a painter based in Brooklyn, NY who’s work centers around observation and abstraction. Concerned with experiences living in and moving through public and interior spaces, the artist’s works implicate the body and reference landscape, the street, windows, beds, and blankets. Messineo engages a wide, and sometimes incongruous range of scale relationships, mark-making, and compositional structures to make the paintings, from expressionist gesture, to process-based systems and chance encounters. Many of the large paintings incorporate sheets of plywood adhered to the surface of the canvas, often extending beyond the rectangular picture plane to create idiosyncratic shapes. The rigid elements allow Messineo to push the application and texture of the oil paint—thick, impasto sections are scraped onto the surface or carved into, scribbling marks fade into shifting moments of washy, brushed-on color.

Messineo received an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2009, and a BFA from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in 2002. Messineo has been included in exhibitions at CANADA, New York; James Cohan Gallery, New York; Ceysson et Benetiere, Koerich, Luxembourg; and Artist Curated Projects, Redling Fine Art, REDCAT Gallery, all in Los Angeles. Messineo is a Shandaken: Paint School Fellow, and also completed the Fire Island Artist Residency in 2014. Messineo’s work is included in the Dallas Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

RJ Messineo, Mary Carol (Colors for a Room in a House), 2021, oil, plywood and rare earth magnets on canvas, 81-1/4" × 64-1/2" (206.4 cm × 163.8 cm)
RJ Messineo, Little Rain, 2021, oil, plywood and rare earth magnets on canvas, 88" × 54" (223.5 cm × 137.2 cm)
Anna Park, Swingers, 2021, charcoal on paper, 60" × 68" (152.4 cm × 172.7 cm)
Anna Park

Anna Park (b. 1996, Daegu, South Korea) works and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Working initially from a sketch, Park develops and unpacks imaginary scenes with the support of her extensive personal image archive, mostly stock images sourced from the internet. These scenes often begin as universally recognizable moments or symbols that the artist then complicates with the introduction of additional layers of imagery that reveal and conceal. What unfolds are restless visions of smeared faces, wrestling limbs, ruched fabrics, and speed streaks—works that recall the vigorous energy of the graphic novel and the radical fragmentation of Cubism.

Anna Park, Free Fall, 2021, charcoal on paper on panel, 90" × 120" (228.6 cm × 304.8 cm)

Park’s work has been featured in the group exhibitions 100 Drawings from Now, The Drawing Center, New York, NY (2020); Art on the Grid, Public Art Fund, New York, NY; Drawn Together Again, Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY (2019); among others. She received her BA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY and her MFA from New York Academy of Art, New York, NY. She is the First Prize Winner of the AXA Art Prize (2019) and the Grand Prize Winner of Strokes of Genius 11: Finding Beauty (2019).

Richard Pousette-Dart, Radiance Number 8 (Imploding Light Red), 1973-74, acrylic on linen, 90" × 90" (228.6 cm × 228.6 cm)
Richard Pousette-Dart

Richard Pousette-Dart (b. 1916, Saint Paul, Minnesota; d. 1992, New York) was the youngest artist of the New York School’s first generation of Abstract Expressionists. During his career, Pousette-Dart created a lexicon of biomorphic and totemic forms that provided rich visual and symbolic sources that he would explore throughout his long career in a multitude of painterly approaches. He is recognized for his painting, drawing, photography, and sculpture, which are unified by his expressive use of gesture, form, and color. Never embracing action painting and instead pursuing his own aesthetic, Pousette-Dart sought universal significance in his art, expressed through nonobjective means.

Richard Pousette-Dart, Presence Number 3, Black, 1969, oil on linen, 80" x 80" (203.2 cm x 203.2 cm)

Pousette-Dart’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1963, 1974, 1998); Museum of Modern Art (1969); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1997); and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as well as the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy (2007). Recent monographic presentations have been held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2014); The Drawing Center, New York (2015); Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom (2018); and Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine (2018).

Lucas Samaras, Sittings 8 x 10, 2/21/80, 1980, color Polaroid photograph, 10" x 8" (25.4 cm x 20.3 cm)
Lucas Samaras

Lucas Samaras (b. 1936, Kastoria, Macedonia, Greece) lives and works in New York, NY. Samaras has produced an expansive body of work across media and discipline—including photography, painting, installation, assemblage, drawing, and sculpture—united by a focus on the body and psyche, and often emphasizing autobiography.

Lucas Samaras, Sittings 8 x 10, 2/25/79, 1979, color Polaroid photograph, 10" x 8" (25.4 cm x 20.3 cm)
Lucas Samaras, Sittings 8 x 10, 12/15/78, 1978, color Polaroid photograph, 10" x 8" (25.4 cm x 20.3 cm) paper
Lucas Samaras, Panorama, 2/23/83, Polaroid Polacolor II assemblage, 50-3/4" × 16-1/4" (128.9 cm × 41.3 cm), overall
Marina Perez Simão, Untitled, 2021, oil on canvas, 78-3/4" × 63" (200 cm × 160 cm)
Marina Perez Simão

Marina Perez Simão (b. 1981, Vitória, Brazil) lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. Simão has developed a working process based fundamentally on the accumulation and juxtaposition of memories and images. By combining personal experiences and multiple references stemming from fields such as philosophy, literature, and journalism, the artist collects certain narratives to edit them through pictorial means that do not belong to any predefined language; rather, they develop with an organic practice, which combines thematic density and a delicate treatment.

Kiki Smith, Untitled III (Upside-Down Body with Beads), 1993, white bronze with glass beads and wire © National Gallery of Australia, overall installation dimensions variable 37" x 14-3/4" x 19" (94 cm x 37.5 cm x 48.3 cm), figure 12' 4" x 6' 3" x 1/4" (375.9 cm x 37.5 cm x 0.6 cm), beads
Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith (b. 1954, Nuremberg, Germany) lives and works in New York, NY. Smith uses a broad variety of materials to continuously expand and evolve a body of work that includes sculpture, printmaking, photography, drawing, and textiles.

Smith has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions worldwide including over 25 museum exhibitions. Her work has been featured at five Venice Biennales, including the 2017 edition. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2017 was awarded the title of Honorary Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Previously, Smith was recognized in 2006 by TIME Magazine as one of the “TIME 100: The People Who Shape Our World.” Other awards include the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 2000; the 2009 Edward MacDowell Medal; the 2010 Nelson A. Rockefeller Award, Purchase College School of the Arts; the 2013 U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts, conferred by Hillary Clinton; and the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center, among others. She is an adjunct professor at NYU and Columbia University.

Chibuike Uzoma, The Surge Of A Poem (2), 2021, oil and acrylic spray paint on canvas, 84-1/4" × 60-1/4" (214 cm × 153 cm)
Chibụike Ụzọma

Chibụike Ụzọma (b. 1992, Port Harcourt, Nigeria) lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut. He received his BFA from the University of Benin, Nigeria in 2013, and an MFA from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, in 2021. Chibụike is a multidisciplinary artist working with painting, photography, drawing, texts, and video. By treating art as a subject-object in and of itself, Chibụike’s practice engenders the image with the complexes of narratives and the superstitions of meaning—making the subject matter a pretext for performance, and context, a fluid ground. Chibụike has been invited to participate in projects, exhibitions, and residencies by institutions in Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America.

Chibuike Uzoma, Good For Them, 2021, oil and acrylic spray paint on canvas, 72-1/8" × 61-3/4" (183.2 cm × 156.8 cm)
Chibuike Uzoma, Good For Us, 2021, oil and acrylic spray paint on canvas, 72-1/8" × 61-3/4" (183.2 cm × 156.8 cm)
Chibuike Uzoma, One Had A Lovely Face, 2020, oil and acrylic spray paint on canvas, 84-1/4" × 60-1/4" (214 cm × 153 cm)
Chibuike Uzoma, Joy Of The House (1), 2021, oil and acrylic spray paint on canvas, 72-1/8" × 48-1/8" (183.2 cm × 122.2 cm)
Chibuike Uzoma, The Surge Of A Poem (2), 2021, oil and acrylic spray paint on canvas, 84-1/4" × 60-1/4" (214 cm × 153 cm)
Rachel Eulena Williams, Weighted Quilt, 2021, acrylic paint and dye on canvas, wood panel, hammock and cotton rope, 65" × 77" × 5" (165.1 cm × 195.6 cm × 12.7 cm)
Rachel Eulena Williams

Rachel Eulena Williams (b. 1991, Miami, Florida) is a New York based artist whose work displays an unusual level of candor, invention, and lightness. Exuding confidence and pleasure, her painted constructions employ the language of abstract painting, but are transformed through her distinct approach to material. Finding a balance between painting and sculpture, Williams incorporates large swaths of color made from painted canvases and subsequently cuts them up and reconfigures. The collage-like quality is tied together with sewing, which acts both functionally and creates marks within her compositions. Williams also adds ropes of various lengths and thickness to the works, becoming stand-in gestural marks. The overall feeling is of solidity and lightness, structure and wild chances, jostling to create waves of energy.

Rachel Eulena Williams, Systems, 2021, acrylic paint and dye on canvas, panel, and cotton rope, 73" × 133" × 4" (185.4 cm × 337.8 cm × 10.2 cm)
Zhang Huan, First Love, 2008, ash on linen, 49-1/4" x 78-3/4" (125 cm x 200 cm)
Zhang Huan

Zhang Huan ( b. 1965, Anyang, Henan, China) lives and works in Shanghai and New York City. Zhang is one of the most vital, influential and provocative contemporary artists working today. The layers of ideas the artist explored in his early performance art, conceived of as existential explorations and social commentaries, have carried through to the more traditional studio practice he embraced upon moving to Shanghai in 2005, after living and working for eight years in New York City. Notable one-person exhibitions and installations include: Altered States (2007–08) at the Asia Society, New York; Three-Legged Buddha, Royal Academy of Arts, Annenberg Courtyard, London (2007–08); Dawn of Time, Shanghai Art Museum (2010); Hope Tunnel, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2010), Soul and Matter, Forte di Belvedere and Palazzo Vecchio (2013); Looking East, Facing West: The World of Zhang Huan, Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan, (2013); Evoking Tradition, Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York (2014); and My Temple, erected in Krauthuegel, a city park in Saltzburg, Austria (2015). In 2018, MoMA PS1, New York, exhibited Land: Zhang Huan and Li Binyuan.