Exciting works you can expect to see at the Armory Show in New York City March 7-10 2019
07/03/2019 - 10/03/2019
The Armory Show – Pier 94
The Armory Show is New York City’s premier art fair, and a leading cultural destination for discovering and collecting the world’s most important 20th- and 21st-century art. Staged on Manhattan’s Piers 90, 92, and 94, The Armory Show, supported by Lead Partner Athena Art Finance, will open to the public March 7–10, 2019 features presentations by leading international galleries, innovative artist commissions, and dynamic public programs. Since its founding in 1994, The Armory Show has served as a nexus for the international art world, inspiring dialogue, discovery, and patronage in the visual arts.
“A TOP DRAW FOR HEAVY-HITTING COLLECTORS, GALLERISTS, CELEBRITIES AND ART LOVERS”
NEW YORK TIMES
The Armory Show’s 2019 edition (that celebrates its 25th anniversary this edition) will present 194 galleries from 33 countries, bringing together an unparalleled presentation of international galleries in central Manhattan. This year will also welcome 59 new exhibitors. Here is a short selection of exciting works from Africa and its diaspora, that you can expect to see at the show.
AJARB BERNARD ATEGWA represented by Jack Bell Gallery ( London, England)
Ategwa’s works are large format and mimic the scale of cityscapes and public space. His paintings work as sequences in a larger narrative describing the chaos of his hometown, in Cameroon, where he was born. Moving between the taxi stands, newsagents, bars, roadside markets and fleeting moments of respite, the artist offers snapshots of everyday life. His vivid colour palette and graphic style speak the language of advertising familiar to Douala’s inhabitants. With great skill the artist weaves together urban scenes, sounds and smells to create a rich sensory immersion.
Jody Paulsen represented by SMAC Gallery (Cape Town, South Africa)
Jody Paulsen was born in Cape Town, South Africa where he currently lives and works. Working in textile, particularly felt, Paulsen, explores themes related to his understanding within the context of contemporary, material culture. His work speaks of the process of production as he creates vast, elaborate tapestries and colourful collage works. Various shapes, colours, logos and fonts reference the current age of capitalism and experiences of global culture that shape concepts of gender, sexuality and identity.
Zak Ové represented by Lawrie Shabibi Gallery (Dubai, UAE)
Ové seeks to reignite and reinterpret lost culture and mythology using new-world materials whilst at the same time paying tribute to both spiritual and artistic African identity. Constantly finding unpredictable ways to express recognisable, traditional African forms his practice explores African identity, the African diaspora and African history.
Tiwani Contemporary (London, England) will present works from Virginia Chihota
Introspective in nature, Virginia Chihota‘s work is deeply influenced by personal experiences – landmark and everyday. In a reflection on intimacy and the human figure, she has addressed themes such as childbearing, childrearing, marriage, kinship, bereavement and faith. Having trained as a printmaker, Chihota’s use of screen-printing is as confident as it is original. She mixes printing techniques with drawing to produce unique works of striking formal complexity. She was born in 1983 in Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe and she lives and works in Podgorica, Montenegro.
Mariane Ibrahim Gallery presents a solo booth dedicated to Haitian-American female artist, Florine Démosthène
Florine Demosthene was born in the United States and raised between Port-au-Prince, Haiti and New York. Démosthène earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Parsons the New School for Design in New York and her Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College, City University of New York. Using non-traditional materials like glitter and mylar, her work evoke a strong animated struggle, a fight over existing power. The superpositions of her alter-egos, reflect the resilience of the pre-fabricated codes of aesthetics dictated by a set of behaviors. One cannot escape the commodification and fetishization of the black body. The Artist is exposing a new physical paradigm, using gender and social attributes to escape determinism.
Works by Kapwani Kiwanga presented by Galerie Jerome Poggi (Paris, France)
Kiwanga’s work traces the pervasive impact of power asymmetries by placing historic narratives in dialogue with contemporary realities, the archive, and tomorrow’s possibilities. Her work is research-driven, instigated by marginalised or forgotten histories, and articulated across a range of materials and mediums including sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance. Kiwanga follows the lineage of surveillance and positions it in relation to blackness in America, from its roots in slavery to the role that technology performs today.
Works by Sadie Barnette presented by Charlie James Gallery (Los Angeles, CA, USA)
Whether in the form of drawing, photography or large-scale installation, Sadie Barnette’s work relishes in the abstraction of city space and the transcendence of the mundane to the imaginative. She creates visual compositions that engage a hybrid aesthetic of minimalism and density, using text, glitter, family Polaroids, subculture codes and found objects. Recent works engage as primary source material the 500-page FBI surveillance file kept on her father, Rodney Barnette, who founded the Compton, California, chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968.
Works by Ibrahim El-Salahi presented by Vigo Gallery ( London, England)
A leader of the Sudanese Khartoum School and the first African artist to have a retrospective at the Tate Modern in London, Ibrahim El Salahi combines European styles with traditional Sudanese themes in his art. El Salahi’s art encompasses and explores a range of compositional forms, including fragments of Arabic calligraphy, but perpetually evokes a transnational, African-influenced surrealism.
ACA Galleries ( New York City, NY, USA) will present a selection of works by Faith Ringgold
The painted narrative quilts for which Ringgold is best known grew out of these early paintings, and denounce racism and discrimination with their subject matter. Combining quilt making, genre painting, and story telling through images and hand-written texts, the series “The American Collection” (1997) endeavors to rewrite African American art history, emphasizing the importance of family, roots, and artistic collaboration.
James Cohan Gallery (New York city, USA) will present a sculpture from Yinka Shonibare CBE
Over the past decades, Shonibare has become well known for his exploration of colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalization. Working in painting, sculpture, photography, film and installation, Shonibare’s work examines race, class and the construction of cultural identity through a sharp political commentary of the tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe and their respective economic and political histories.
Omar Ba represented by Templon Gallery (Paris, France)
Born in 1977 in Senegal, Omar Ba lives and works in Dakar and Geneva. His paintings, produced using a variety of techniques and materials, represent political and social motifs open to multiple interpretations. His artistic vocabulary raises historical and timeless questions while formulating a wholly contemporary artistic message. Omar Ba’s iconography features personal metaphors, ancestral references and hybrid figures.
Jack Shainman Gallery (New York City, USA) will present a photography from Gordon Parks
During the late 1940s through the 1960s, Parks produced some of his most renowned photographic essays on issues relating to civil rights. A stoic portrait of Red Jackson, from a 1948 series on the Harlem gang leader, reveals a man seemingly hemmed in by his options as he stares intently out a broken window; the darkness of the interior contrasts forebodingly with the light illuminating him from the street. By showing the individual faces and families behind essentializing headlines of violence and relentless poverty, Parks stressed similarity over difference. His legacy, and the legacy of those he captured, remains very much alive in today’s America.
Richard Taittinger Gallery and Galleria Continua will present a major installation of Pascale Martine Tayou
Pascale Marthine Tayou (b. 1966, Nkongsamba) is an internationally renowned artist whose work is characterized by its variability, since he confines himself in his artistic work neither to one medium nor to a particular set of issues. Already at the very outset of his career, Pascale Marthine Tayou added an “e” to his first and middle name to give them a feminine ending, thus distancing himself ironically from the importance of artistic authorship and male/female ascriptions. His works not only mediate in this sense between cultures, or set man and nature in ambivalent relations to each other, but are produced in the knowledge that they are social, cultural, or political constructions.
The curator’s statement “Plastic bags are helpful, as well as harmful—they carry goods, cross borders, and contribute to plastic pollution. Tayou’s large and visually impressive installation, Plastic Bags (2019), takes ubiquitous objects and uses them to create an artwork that offers a colorful commentary on consumerism and globalism.”
