SIGNED: Nicholas Hlobo

Nicholas Hlobo. Image via rolexmentorprotege.com.

South African Artist is Coming to America

From Lehmann Maupin e-blast (March 9, 2015):

Nicholas Hlobo, one of South Africa’s leading contemporary artists, has joined Lehmann Maupin. Known for his intricate installations, Hlobo investigates issues of identity, sexuality, gender, and class in the context of his South African heritage.

Materials play a significant role in Hlobo’s multi-disciplinary practice, which includes painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, works on paper, and video installation. He prefers tactile items such as ribbon, leather, wood, and rubber, exploring the symbolic power of these raw materials and their potential for transformation.

As part of the Xhosa people, Hlobo makes work that is anchored in his South African background. The linguistic flexibility of the Xhosa language, with its poetic idioms, proverbs, and double entendres, allows the artist to discuss the various facets of his own personal identity alongside a wider cultural history.

“Nicholas Hlobo is a fantastic artist with incredible international recognition,” said Rachel Lehmann. “Like a poet, he is exploring the in between places that are difficult to define - such as the area between male and female, between white, gray, and black. The themes he addresses of nationality, race, gender, sexuality, and identity are all strongly engaged with Lehmann Maupin’s programing and have ties to the work of Kader Attia, Robin Rhode, Mickalene Thomas, and Adriana Varejão.”

The artist’s first show with Lehmann Maupin is scheduled for 2016 in New York.

About the artist

Nicholas Hlobo (b. 1975, Cape Town, South Africa) received a Fine Art degree from Johannesburg’s Technikon Witwatersrand in 2002. Hlobo’s exhibition history includes solo exhibitions at Locust Projects, Miami, Florida (2013); National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway (2011); Savannah College of Art and Design, Lacoste, France (2010); Tate Modern, London (2008); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts (2008); and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia (2007). He has participated in several international biennials and notable group exhibitions including The Divine Comedy at the Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2014); the 18th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2012); the 54th Venice Biennale (2011); La Triennale at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); the Liverpool Biennial (2010); the Guangzhou Triennial, China (2008); and Flow at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2008). In November 2015, Hlobo will participate in Performa, the biennial dedicated to performance art in New York. Hlobo’s work is included in numerous collections including the South African National Art Gallery, Cape Town; Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia; Tate Modern, London; and the Pompidou Centre, Paris. The artist lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Nicholas Hlobo, Installation of Iimpundulu Zonke Ziyandilandela (All the Lightning Birds Are After Me), 2011, ILLUMInations, 54th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. Photo: Mario Todeschini.

Nicholas Hlobo Lehmann Maupin Artist Page

SIGNED: Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Something Split and New, 2013.

London-based Victoria Miro Gallery proudly announces its representation of Nigerian artist

From Victoria Miro e-blast:

Victoria Miro is delighted to announce representation of Njideka Akunyili Crosby and congratulates her on winning the Smithsonisan American Art Museum's James Dicke Contemporary Artist Prize.

The museum’s prestigious contemporary artist award was established in 2001 to recognize an artist younger than 50 who has produced a significant body of work and consistently demonstrates exceptional creativity. Previous winners of this award include Pierre Huyghe; Mark Dion; Jessica Stockholder; Andrea Zittel; Kara Walker; Rirkrit Tiravanija and Jorge Pardo.

Akunyili Crosby has also been selected for the New Museum Triennial, Surround Audience, curated by Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin in New York on February 25, 2015 through May 24, 2015.

Informed by art historical and literary sources, Akunyili Crosby’s complex, multi-layered works reflect contemporary transcultural identity. Combining drawing, painting and collage on paper, Akunyili Crosby’s large-scale figurative compositions are drawn from the artist’s memories and experiences. She uses the visual language and inherited traditions of classical academic western painting, particularly the portrait and still life. Akunyili Crosby’s characters and scenes, however, occupy the liminal, in-between zone that post-colonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha refers to as ‘the third space’, a point of overlap, conflation and mixing of cultural influences specific to diaspora communities.

Akunyili Crosby was born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1983, where she lived until the age of sixteen. In 1999 she moved to the United States. Her cultural identity combines strong attachments to the country of her birth and to her adopted home. This hybrid sense of self is reflected in her work which is populated with images of family and friends in scenarios with details derived from everyday domestic experiences in Nigeria and America. These include recollections from the formative years of her upbringing, as well as more recent relationships and experiences. Her work often features an element of self-portrait, as in a series of intimate scenes of the artist with her husband made in the early years of their marriage.

Her work is in the collections of major museums including Yale University Art Gallery, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and Tate. Akunyili Crosby currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She has most recently participated in Draped Down at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York and Sound Vision at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s Victoria Miro Artist Page

SIGNED: Patrick Earl Hammie

Patrick Earl Hammie, Case, 2012, Oil on linen, 30 x 40 inches. © Patrick Earl Hammie. All rights reserved.

Miami-based gallery pleased to announce its representation of Midwest artist

From Yeelen Gallery e-blast:

Patrick Earl Hammie born 1981 in New Haven, Connecticut, is an artist best known for his monumental portraits related primarily to themes of identity, history, and narrative. Considering the potential paintings of the human figure have to reflect the values of the period in which they are produced, Hammie’s work investigates the expectations built into this canonical genre, probing and dismantling the idealizing impulses that have historically shaped it. Drawing on the emotive qualities of Romanticist painting and its use of heroic proportions to engage with political and humanistic expression, he focuses specifically on constructions of gender and race, putting pressure on these categories as a means of expanding understandings of identity, and reconfiguring inherited conceptions of ideal beauty and heroic nudity.

Patrick Earl Hammie received his B.A. from Coker College and his M.F.A. in painting from the University of Connecticut. Hammie is currently an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he lives and works.

Patrick Earl Hammie has exhibited throughout the U.S. including Stewart Center Gallery at Purdue University, Porter Butts Gallery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Drawing Center in New York. In 2008, he received an Alice C. Cole ’42 fellowship from Wellesley College, where he was in residence for one year and completed his project Equivalent Exchange. In 2011, he was an artist in residence at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center with support from Alliance of Artists Communities with the Joyce Foundation.

Yeelen Gallery is a contemporary art space occupying a 10,000 square-foot converted industrial space in Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood. The Gallery mounts exhibitions of a dynamic and ambitious nature by sustaining four exhibition spaces with a focus on figuration, realism, and symbolism.

Patrick Earl Hammie’s Yeelen Gallery artist page

SIGNED: Kerry James Marshall

Kerry James Marshall. Crowning Moment, 2014. Acrylic on PVC panel. 23 5/8 x 20 7/8 inches (60 x 53 cm).

Image via davidzwirner.com.

Venerable US artist now represented in the UK

From davidzwirner.com:

David Zwirner is pleased to announce that Kerry James Marshall has joined the London gallery, where an exhibition of new work will open in October 2014. This will be the artist’s first solo show in the city since his 2005 presentation at the Camden Arts Centre.   

With a career spanning almost three decades, Marshall is well known for his paintings depicting actual and imagined events from African-American history. His complex and multilayered portrayals of youths, interiors, nudes, housing estate gardens, land- and seascapes synthesize different traditions and genres, while seeking to counter stereotypical representations of black people in society. Engaging with issues of identity and individualism, he frequently depicts his figures in an extreme opaque, black color, which stylizes their appearance while being a literal and rhetorical reference to the term black and its diametric opposition to the white “mainstream.” With art history today acknowledged as having been written from the perspective of white Western artists, Marshall assimilates the limitations and contradictions inherent in its styles, subjects, and chronologies, creating highly personalized works that appear recognizable and unfamiliar at the same time.

Marshall also produces drawings in the style of comic books, sculptural installations, photography, and video. As with his paintings, these works accumulate various stylistic influences to address the historiography of black art, while at the same time drawing attention to the fact that they are not inherently partisan because their subjects are black. 

For his first show with David Zwirner, Marshall will present new paintings that collectively examine notions of observing, witnessing, and exhibiting. While central to the relationship between viewer and artwork, these overarching concepts are typically steeped in conventions that render them passive acts. Marshall veers away from common expectations of how works are displayed to be seen, using the etymological differences between looking and seeing as his point of departure for a series of portraits where the subjects’ dissociated stares seem as defiant as they are mystifying. A fully illustrated book is forthcoming by the gallery’s new publishing program. 

Kerry James Marshall was born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama. He studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, earning his B.F.A. in 1978 and an honorary doctorate in 1999. 

Marshall has exhibited widely throughout Europe and the United States since the late 1970s and early 1980s. His work is currently the subject of a major survey entitled Painting and Other Stuff. Marking the most comprehensive presentation of his work to date, the exhibition was ἀrst on view in 2013 at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen in Antwerp, before traveling to the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen earlier this year. The show is co-hosted by two venues in Spain, the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona (June 11 to October 26, 2014) and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid  (June 13 to October 26, 2014). 

Other prominent institutions which have presented solo shows include the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2013); Secession, Vienna (2012); Vancouver Art Gallery (2010); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2009); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2008); Camden Arts Centre, London (2005); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2004); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2003); The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York (both 1998). 

In 2014, Marshall was the recipient of the Wolfgang Hahn Prize, an award given annually by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Other prestigious awards include a 1997 grant from the MacArthur Foundation and a 1991 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Museum collections which hold works by the artist include the Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Marshall lives and works in Chicago.

In addition to David Zwirner, the artist is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York and Koplin Del Rio in Los Angeles. 

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SIGNED: Titus Kaphar

Titus Kaphar photographed February 28, 2013 in New York City. BlackArtistNews photo. All rights reserved.

Major talent adds weight to hefty roster at Jack Shainman  

BlackArtistNews | May 30, 2014

BlackArtistNews has learned that Jack Shainman now represents Titus Kaphar. The artist may appear to be a rookie amongst the gallery’s elite register of established veterans El Anatsui, Kerry James Marshall and Carrie Mae Weems, but his protean talent has proven he's a heavy hitter well prepared to join their league.

From tituskaphar.com:

Titus Kaphar was born in 1976 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He currently lives and works between New York and Connecticut, USA. His artworks interact with the history of art by appropriating its styles and mediums. Kaphar cuts, bends, sculpts and mixes the work of Classic and Renaissance painters, creating formal games and new tales between fiction and quotation.

From the essay “Intricate Illusion” by Bridget R. Cooks, PhD:

Kaphar works hard to present the appearance of the truth in painting as his first effect. His paintings offer something familiar to draw the viewer in and, at the same time, offer a deformation. Within a few moments of approaching one of his works, it is clear that something is not quite right. The viewers must labor to deduce what exactly is going on. The persistence of change in Kaphar’s work mimics the revelation of inherited narratives within personal and collective histories that explain how our present constructed as deceptively simple truths: the past, like the present, is complex, sloppy, and contradictory; our understanding of history as an easily consumable narrative is often an intricate illusion. The fact that histories have multiple points of view is a given for Kaphar, and his work offers these perspectives for the viewer both to experience and reveal.

Click here to read complete text for “Intricate Illusion” published on the occasion of the exhibition Titus Kaphar: Classical Disruption, February 17 – April 2, 2011, at Friedman Benda, New York.

Titus Kaphar at Jack Shainman Gallery

SIGNED: Mickalene Thomas

Mickalene Thomas photographed by Roberto Chamorro. Image via absoluteartbureau.com.

New York based artist now represented by Kavi Gupta CHICAGO | BERLIN

From KaviGupta.com, March 19, 2014:

Drawing from a long study of art history and the classical genres of portraiture, landscape and still life, Mickalene Thomas's political and pop- culturally infused imagery explores constructed notions of identity and the self. Her multi-referential work presents a complex viewpoint on what it means to be a contemporary woman. Best known for her elaborate rhinestone-encrusted paintings, Thomas’s works explore space, pattern and identity through representations of figures and décor and question popular notions of beauty and embodiment from a fragmented perspective.

In Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2012- 2013, the film Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman, premiered. This short documentary, a poignant portrait of Thomas’s mother Sandra Bush, has since been screened internationally and aired on HBO in 2014. Bush was both mother and artistic muse to Thomas, modeling for and appearing in some of her most well known paintings. This sophisticated film continues her thoughtful investigations into the transience of female representation. These explorations are echoed in Thomas’s recent collaged compositions of evocative interiors aimed at challenging conventional notions of domesticity and personal space.

Mickalene Thomas lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally including her upcoming exhibitions Face à Face, 2014, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY and Femme au divan II, 2014, l'Ecole des Beaux Art, Monaco. Recent select solo exhibitions include faux real, 2013, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; Origin of the Universe, 2012 - 13, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA and Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Mickalene Thomas, 2012, Fontene Demoulas Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; How to Organize a Room Around a Striking Piece of Art, 2013, Lehmann Maupin, New York, NY; Mickalene Thomas: Mama- Bush: One of a Kind Two, 2011, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; Put a Little Sugar in my Bowl, 2011, Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles, CA. Thomas earned her MFA from Yale University in 2002, and a BFA from Pratt Institute in 2000. In 2002-03 she participated in the Artist-in-Residence program at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in 2011 she was a resident at the Versailles Foundation Munn Artists Program in Giverny, France.

Thomas is represented by Lehmann Maupin in New York and Hong Kong, Susan Vielmetter in Los Angeles, and Galerie Nathalia Obadia in Paris and Brussels.

Mickalene Thomas’s first exhibition with Kavi Gupta CHICAGO | BERLIN is forthcoming. 

Mickalene Thomas artist page at Kavi Gupta