Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to announce Body Language, a group exhibition including six international artists whose work reflects on the human body. In their diverse practices, the artists included do not utilize the body for its physical form, but instead, as a conduit to explore both internal and political dimensions. Acknowledging that our bodies are constantly subject to cultural, and identity-based readings, the artists in the exhibition utilize these preconceptions in order to explore the body’s political dimensions, and to encourage deeper understandings of its humanity.
Manuel Mathieu (b. 1986, Port-au-Prince, Haiti) blends figuration and abstraction in his work to explore the intersection of racial, geographical, and cultural identities. Working with muted and pastel colors, Mathieu manipulates paint by employing techniques such as scratching, rubbing, and layering—at times adding tape and chalk to the canvas surface— to create the ghostly figures and varied textures that characterize his paintings. This process becomes a vehicle for Mathieu to contemplate legacies of trauma—both personal and collective— calling for a revisitation of the past in order to relieve ongoing trauma in the present. Mathieu lives and works in Montreal. Exhibitions of Mathieu’s work include Manuel Mathieu: World Discovered Under Other Skies, The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada; Manuel Mathieu: Survivance, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montréal, Canada; The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL, USA; Over My Black Body, curated by Eunice Bélidor and Anaïs Castro, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada; Manuel Mathieu: Nobody Is Watching, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; and Manuel Mathieu: Wu Ji, HdM Gallery, Beijing, China. Mathieu has been invited to the artist residency at the Art House in Sonoma, CA, in 2021.
