An exploration of the black male body through sport

THE CONTEST unravels Jiménez’s own queer imagination to physicality. The works grapple with his deeply personal and once estranged relationship with his father, a bodybuilder and boxer. Jiménez adopts the boxer and bodybuilder as motifs, recalling early ideas of the body, specifically the Black male body. Placed within each ‘pose’ or boxing ring, the large scale boxers and body builders brawl, their positions mighty, next to bronze sculptures of heads with colorful boxing headgear. He finds beauty in the color and sculptural physicality of boxing headgear and the groin protector that transforms the body into something strong, powerful and guarded.

As a progression of Jiménez’s work, the latest iteration of his colorful collage materials allude to Western culture through the reuse of everyday materials such as wallpaper, popular clothing brand names, magazine clippings and amate, traditional bark papers of Mexican craft. The materiality of charcoal allows the artist to construct statuesque marble-like figures that make reference to Greco-Roman sculpture, and the ways male beauty has been interpreted through the lens of a Western art historical cannon. 

Through physically cutting these materials out, and piecing them back together Jiménez permits the reconstruction of memories by using the material fragments of imagery which were literally part of his, possibly his father’s, and maybe even our own memories.

Clothilde Jiménez

Clotilde Jiménez’s work is primarily figurative; though there has been a departure into still life compositions, these moments also reference the body. In conventional portraiture, artists depict facial expressions to convey interior thoughts of their subjects; often particular narratives are surmised when viewing distraught eyes, a menacing grin, or a cold blank stare. Contrary to conventional modes of portraiture, like an abstractionist, Jiménez utilizes self-evaluated emotions to expressionistically create form. Through a rigorous self-analysis of his life’s emotional encounters, these forms appear as faces, bodies, and symbols, based on lived experiences, critical meditations, and an art historical dialogue.

Jiménez’s skillful figuration is not static, intended to be contemplated technically and formally alone. Though the sophistication of the artist’s considerable technical abilities warrants critical engagement and praise, the most compelling qualities of his work are conceptually based. In disparate modes: journal sketches, fully realized drawings and paintings, bronze sculpture, and collage, the body is consistently central, operating within individual and group portraits that privilege its expressive poses and gestures, within idiosyncratic storytelling, further accentuated by clothing and props.

Referencing intricate aspects of Jiménez’s life, strategically cut and arranged layers of multimedia collage, activate a dynamistic viewing of the visual narratives presented. “Most of my work is autobiographical, so collage allows me to tell several stories at the same time”, Jiménez states. Through a kaleidoscope lens, composite portraits within montaged vignettes, offer a dream-like gaze into the artist’s inner thoughts.

“I want to be a storyteller for people who look like me. The people whose stories have been marginalized and ignored. What I want to do is be the person that I needed when growing up— someone who depicts the complexities of Black life, what it means to be queer, and how it is OK. I aim to provide greater representation of my people within the art historical canon.” Clothilde Jiménez

THE CONTEST

Clothilde Jimenez

Mariane Ibrahim

July 11 – August 22, 2020

437 N. Paulina St

Chicago, IL 60622

The post The Contest: Clothilde Jiménez’s Solo Show At Mariane Ibrahim Gallery appeared first on Artskop.

The setting of the works act as scenes from history, retracing his family memories while examining the origin of his own life by representing intimate and often jubilant moments, affirming the multilayered experience of the African-American diaspora. His childhood in Baltimore influenced his perspective of socio-economics, body politics, race, economic disparities and their influence on one another. Through these figurative portraits, he accentuates banal representations of black identity by depicting empathy, inviting the possibility for a spiritual connection.

In 2019, the gallery exhibited works by Gibbs at EXPO Chicago and in Disembodiment, a group show currently on view at UTA Artist Space in Beverly Hills, curated by Mariane Ibrahim, on view until January 25, 2020. His work is also on view locally in Baltimore in “Our World” curated by renowned artist Derrick Adams at the Eubie Blake National Jazz Institute and Cultural Center, on view until January 18, 2020. 

The gallery will present a solo exhibition of his work in 2021. 

Please visit the Mariane Ibrahim’s page on Artskop437 Database.

437 N. Paulina St

Mariane Ibrahim Gallery

Chicago, IL 60622

Opening September 20, 2019

Tues – Sat: 11 AM – 6 PM 

The post Mariane Ibrahim to representing Jerrell Gibbs appeared first on Artskop.

Mariane Ibrahim represents, in North America, Raphaël Barontini, the 2019 recipient of the 2nd Prize of the International Tapestry Prize of Aubusson in France. Raphaël Barontini is a French-based artist whose work is a coalescence of classical painting and contemporary fragments. His subject matter includes classical iconography, colonial history and the visual culture of the French Caribbean rooted in African ancestry. His otherworldly images are strengthened by his multidisciplinary practice, honing in on photographic elements, each piece begins with a digital collage, sourcing imagery from his personal archives or museum collections. Raphaël Barontini layers plural concepts in his backdrop and intentionally assembles digital and analog elements while professing his Dadaist influences. More so, his hybrid collages mirror postcolonial rhetorical questions and criticisms confronting history. 

In his oeuvre, Raphael Barontini often uses the term ‘creolisation’ associated with writers and thinkers of the French Caribbean (where Barontini has roots), such as Édouard Glissant and Aimé Césaire and compares his practice to Dadaist Hannah Höch or African-American collagist Romare Bearden.

Flags, banners, pennants, curtains, tapestries – the silkscreened and digitally printed monochromatic images embellished with bold color are layered onto the textiles. Barontini engages with symbolic attributes of fabrics deployed to exalte armorial prowess.  The hybrid nature of his work is accentuated with the fluidity of his material, using textile assemblage to preface dichotomic elements and allows space for him to explore spatial installations. 

In 2019, Raphaël Barontini was selected by the LVMH Group to join its artist in residence program sponsored by LVMH Métiers d’Art, which will begin in January 2020. Raphaël Barontini will spend six months working with artisans at the Heng Long Leather Tannery in Singapore. Barontini will have access to the production resources of the tannery and will work closely with its local artisans. Raphael Barontini is also represented in Turkey by The Pill and in Spain by Espai Tactel.

The artist, who works and lives in Saint-Denis, a northern suburb of Paris, studied  at the Hunter College of Art in New York and at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux arts in Paris, and graduating in 2009.

The artist has exhibited work in galleries and museums throughout the world, including Brazil, France, Haiti, Mali, Morocco, Peru, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. He has also participated in international biennales in Bamako, Casablanca, Lima and Thessaloniki. The artist is currently presenting an institutional solo-exhibition at SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, in Savannah at the on view until January 2020.

The post Mariane Ibrahim to represent Raphaël Barontini in North America appeared first on Artskop.

Démosthène’s contemporary take on the body, in the form of multi-media paintings and collage, represent otherworldly dystopian characteristics, furthering the artists’ study of our divine spirit. Démosthène’s heroines criticize beauty canons through the narrative of her self-made feminine heros. In this new body of work, the artist questions, “How do we connect to our inner essence? How do we connect to our ‘self,’ while disconnecting from stories and religions we have been taught?”

The duality of her figures consider stereotypical and two-dimensional notions of the black female body. The artist presents her adulation for duplicates by portraying her own body, often duplicated. The existence of twins has provoked curiosity and veneration amongst numerous societies, particularly in West African and Haitian sacred cultures. Démosthène’s art is comprehensively performative, emphasizing flesh and form among an evanescent backdrop. The use of mylar, inherent to her former architectural training, enhance the lack of permanence in the background suggesting the figures are floating and translucent. Between reverie and reality, dream and nightmare, possibility and actuality, Démosthène plunges the viewer into her intertwined almost science-fiction dimension.

Between Possibility and Actuality

Mariane Ibrahim Gallery
Opening Saturday, November 2, 2019
4pm – 7pm.

On view till December 21, 2019

Mariane Ibrahim Gallery
437 N Paulina Street
Chicago, IL 60622
Tue-Sat 4pm-7pm

The post Florine Démosthène’s first solo at Mariane Ibrahim appeared first on Artskop.

Take Me to the Water presents a holistic survey of Ayana V. Jackson ‘s work to date, a culmination of varied discursive elements present in Jackson’s more than a decade long career. These portraits and movement studies offer a sense of the breadth of her practice, while at the same time taking her into new territories with regard to the range of her performances.

Ayana V. Jackson has used the archival impulse to assess the impact of the colonial gaze on the history of photography and its relationship to ideas about the body. She uses her lens to deconstruct 19th and early 20th century portraiture as a means for questioning photography’s role in constructing identities. Her thesis is further complicated by the presence of the artist’s figure. She uses her own body to perform the characters with whom she concerns herself.

Ayana V. Jackson’s work seeks to crystallize the experience of contemporary Africa and African diasporic societies. She uses honed technical skills to create hauntingly candid portraits that depict varying constructions of African and African-American identity. Her images have a compelling complexity: They are richly laced historical allusions, reappropriations of past moments and maps of the ethical considerations involved in the relationship between photographer, subject and viewer.

While Take Me to the Water is consistent with the artists ongong “memory work,” it is a striking departure from her commitment to lived histories as she has chosen to embrace the magical worlds of speculative fiction. Her new characters inhabit an aquatopia populated by aquahumanoids whose attributes are inspired by African and African Diasporic water spirits. From Olokun to Mame Coumba bang, from Kianda to Drexciya, from Yenanja to Mamiwata, Jackson is interested in “the mythic worlds we have studied,” yet emphasizes that she is, “more concerned with those we have been taught to forget.”

Ayana V. Jackson’s photographs are included in multiple public and private collections including The Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC; The Newark Museum, NJ; The JP Chase Morgan collection, NY; Princeton University Art Museum, NJ; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; The MoCP Chicago, IL; and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, WA. Born in the United States, based between Johannesburg, New York and Paris, Jackson was a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow for Photography, and the recipient of the 2018 Smithsonian Fellowship.

For further information, please contact Mariane Ibrahim Gallery
Take me to the water by Ayana V. Jackson
from September 20 – October 26, 2019.

MARIANE IBRAHIM
437 N. Paulina St
Chicago, IL 60622
Opening September 20, 2019

The post Ayana V. Jackson expands into new territories in portraiture appeared first on Artskop.

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.”

The Armory Show – March 7-10 2019

Piers 90, 92, and 94
New York City

Public Days 

Thursday, March 7, 12pm — 8pm
Friday, March 8, 12pm — 8pm
Saturday, March 9, 12pm — 7pm
Sunday, March 10, 12pm — 6pm

The post Exciting works you can expect to see at the Armory Show in New York City March 7-10 2019 appeared first on Artskop.