Until July 26, Galerie Templon is showcasing contemporary drawing by bringing together Omar Ba, Abdelkader Benchamma, Norbert Bisky, Oda Jaune and Chiharu Shiota around the group exhibition “From the Paper to the Wall”.

By bringing together these five international artists, Galerie Templon wanted to create a truly original and celebratory show. In this perspective, the artists were invited to appropriate the walls of the Brussels space, to create an array of unique wall installations. In direct dialogue with these ephemeral works, each artist presents a new series of drawings produced especially for the exhibition.

The five artists, members of the same generation and hailing from three different continents, Africa, Asia and Europe, represent a globalised world where different cultures meet, mingle and merge.

What their work has in common is the role given to drawing, elevated to the same rank as painting, sculpture and installations. Their drawing practice is thus given free rein to explore a range of tools, materials and supports as they cover the walls and appropriate the space.

The From the Paper to the Wall exhibition invites visitors on a journey where they can experience the same feelings of playfulness and freedom. It can be visited in the gallery from 6 June to 26 July and online via a dedicated website.

drawingroom.templon.com

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GALERIE TEMPLON
Veydtstraat 13A
1060 Brussels – Belgium
Tuesday – Saturday, 11 am – 6 pm

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« I am interested in transformation and artifice. My newest exhibition will engage with the history of France and its outward facing relationship to black and brown bodies, specifically relating to sexual proclivity. Gauguin features heavily in the imagination of France and her global interface – with that comes an entire history of complicated gazing. I interrogate, subsume, and participate in discourse about Māhū, about France, and about the invention of gender. » .– Kehinde Wiley, 2019

Kehinde Wiley, star of the American art scene, official portrait painter of Barack Obama, and founder of the multidisciplinary artist residency program “Black Rock Sénégal” is back in Paris. For his first Parisian exhibition since the 2016 show at Petit Palais, he will be unveiling a new series of paintings and a video-installation based on his time spent this past year in Tahiti.

Wiley’s new works are focused on Tahiti’s Māhū community, the traditional Polynesian classification of people of a third gender, between male and female.  The Māhū were highly respected within their society until they were banned by Catholic and Protestant missionaries.

Wiley’s portraits of beautiful, transgender Tahitian women reference and confront Paul Gauguin’s celebrated works, which also feature subjects from the transgender community, but are fraught with historical undertones of colonialism and sexual objectification.

Building off of Wiley’s earlier portraits that addressed issues of masculine identity and virility, these new portraits explore issues of identity through the lens of transformation, exploring both artifice and artificiality as a trans-cultural phenomenon.

Over the past fifteen years, Wiley has developed a remarkable body of work that at once questions and participates in the western art-historical canon of portraiture. Wiley’s encounter with Tahiti joins with the artist’s continued journey across the contemporary world, following his explorations of North America, South Asia, and West Africa.

Wiley’s focus on Tahiti now offers the opportunity to re-examine France, its colonial history, and its image through the prism of Gauguin’s work. True to his oeuvre, this exhibition presents a uniquely political and aesthetic perspective on the power of art to shift perception and to make visible history’s forgotten figures.

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GALERIE TEMPLON
28 rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare
75003 Paris – France
Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 7 pm

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Why such a title for your second exhibition at the Templon Gallery, “the autopsy of our consciences”?

In the world, I have noticed that things are repeating themselves, that they are not changing, especially the hardest ones, such as war and economic violence. There are real offices. I wanted to do an autopsy of these facts, analyze them. Put everything on the table.

The paintings are direct, quite engaged. Maybe more than before?

I took more things off, I went straight to the point. I no longer seek to embellish reality. The tracks are very muffled and at the same time, the criticism is direct. She’s not covered.

In your opinion, can art make a difference?

It can. The simple fact, concerning me, of saying all these things, of moving towards that, is a situation of comfort. I know that I am included in an economic system, that I am an artist in a commercial gallery. However, I have the freedom to say what I think, and I ask questions about these phenomena, loud and clear. Alone, I won’t change anything, but collectively, artists can.

Your works are marked by their verticality…

I favour verticality, that’s true. My compositions are often full-length characters. I myself look from the bottom up, very axially. Afterwards, this exhibition marks the appearance of the square, I gain in width. This allows me to make the compositions more complex, to include more characters.

You grew up in Dakar in the 1990s, at a time when the Senegalese art world was torn between Léopold Sédar Senghor’s “negritude” and alternative paths, such as Agit’art. Did it forge your way of looking at art?

At first, yes, but the fact of travelling, of living in Europe, all this made me leave this vision of the world. Today, my consciousness is made up of mixed influences. What I want is to build bridges between the North and the South…

By the way, is that what explains your transition from abstraction to figuration, when you arrived in Geneva?

Indeed, this passage was fuelled by frustration, the need to be understood. I came from Senegal, but people didn’t understand my work, didn’t know how to read my abstraction. I had to find a way to communicate that would work everywhere. Afterwards, some patterns remained, the color is still as important as ever… but my language is more universal.

Autopsie de nos consciences

Visit Omar Ba‘s profile on Artskop3437

Templon Gallery

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