NEW YORK: Laylah Ali

Laylah Ali artwork via paulkasmingallery.com.

The Acephalous Series

March 25 - April 25, 2015

PAUL KASMIN GALLERY

293 Tenth Avenue

New York, NY

From paulkasmingallery.com:

Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to present The Acephalous Series, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Laylah Ali. This is the artist’s first show with the gallery and her first solo exhibition of paintings in New York since 2005.

Widely known for her iconic series, the Greenheads, which was the subject of a traveling museum exhibition from 2012 – 2013, Ali explores power dynamics and interpersonal conflict through compositions that position culturally and sexually ambiguous figures in precarious, loaded, and unexpectedly humorous situations.  While the works included in The Acephalous Series are similarly engaging and metaphoric, Ali has introduced new narratives with a fraught community of figures, including those with minimal bodies, some who lack heads, or appear to be on an endless, determined trek.

The exhibition will be comprised of ten gouache and acrylic paintings on paper.  While maintaining her characteristic intensive process, the works in The Acephalous Series are Ali’s largest in scale to date.

Laylah Ali was included in the 2003 Venice Biennale and the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and she has had solo exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, amongst many others.

Exhibit Link

Exhibit Link

ACQUISITION: Laylah Ali / Untitled (Greenheads) / Davis Museum and Cultural Center / Wellesley, MA

Laylah Ali, Untitled (Greenheads), 1998. Gouache on Paper, 8 3/4 in x 13 3/4 in.

Davis Museum purchase, Emma B. Sands Jewett Art Fund, 2010.45.

Laylah Ali, Untitled (Greenheads), 1998 

Text by Lisa Fischman, Ruth Gordon Shapiro '37 Director

Significant within her oeuvre, Laylah Ali’s Untitled demonstrates her critically acclaimed “greenheads” series — spare gouache paintings that render brightly colored characters with big round heads against distinctive sky-blue planes. In composition and style (here, employing segmented frames), her images reference comics and employ the graphic punch and egalitarian accessibility associated with that medium to new effect. Deceptively simple, the work displays the artist’s technical virtuosity and erudition, a combination of conceptual precision and an intuitive grasp of the communicative power of her medium. Ali’s careful choices — stripping figure and ground to the barest essentials, juxtaposing cheerful color and dark subject matter, and selecting a small format to further condense the work’s charge — are strategic; they render the images highly evocative, open to multiple interpretations and resistant to complete definition.

Ali sets her characters, in groups or alone, into uncertain circumstances to suggest stories with shadowy outcomes. Signs and symbols (ie. ancient Egyptian dress and hair styles; priestly raiment) reappear throughout the work, functioning like components of an artistic alphabet or as keys to a language that is obscured yet familiar. Pervasive themes— violence and passivity, affiliation and alienation, parity and inequality— link Ali’s images to historical and contemporary circumstances, to political, social, and cultural conditions.

With a distinctive clarity of purpose, her work insists on viewer participation, and it is through this vital act of looking and complicity in the construction of meaning that Ali’s oeuvre in turn enriches the contemporary art dialogue.

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