Kavi Gupta welcomes the return of EXPO Chicago. A pivotal international platform for contemporary art, EXPO Chicago is crucial to our gallery’s mission to amplify voices of diverse and underrepresented artists to expand the canon of art history.

Our 2023 presentation will include works from James Little, the breakout star of the 2022 Whitney Biennial. With more than half a floor of the biennial devoted to his abstract paintings, Little is finally achieving the recognition he has long deserved as an American master.

In conjunction with the openings of their solo exhibitions at our Chicago area galleries, we will spotlight the practices of internationally acclaimed conceptual artist Esmaa Mohamoud; Trinidadian-American artist Allana Clarke; and Guyana-born, Los Angeles-based artist Suchitra Mattai. 

Little's aesthetic language is rooted in simplicity, centering geometric shapes and patterns, flat surfaces, and emotive color relationships. In an age that frequently trades durability for ephemerality and mastery for instant gratification, Little might be seen as an outlier—a careful, precise, disciplined perfectionist who seeks personal improvement over fame and outside recognition. Yet, it is by embodying these rare values that Little can rightly be called the most important painter in America today. The restraint of his pictures belies the startling complexity of their making—Little makes his own binders and grinds his own pigments, and paints a majority of his works using what is the most complex and difficult-to-master method ever devised: blending handmade pigments with hot beeswax, similar to the encaustic painting technique developed by ancient Egyptian and Greek artists. In his studio/laboratory, Little hand manufactures this difficult medium, which is proven, under the right circumstances, to never wear down with age. Properly cared for, his wax paintings will look as vibrant and luminous a thousand years from now as they do today. 

Little is a 2009 recipient of the Joan Mitchel Foundation Award for Painting. In addition to being featured prominently in the 2022 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY, his work has been exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions around the world, including at MoMA P.S.1, New York, NY; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; and the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Homecoming: Bittersweet, at Dixon Gallery & Gardens: Art Museum, Memphis, TN, with an accompanying catalogue, and at Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, in 2022. In 2022, Little will also participate in a historic collaboration for Duke Ellington's conceptual Sacred Concerts series at the Lincoln Center, New York, NY, with the New York Choral Society at the New School for Social Research and the Schomburg Center in New York, NY. His paintings are represented in the collections of numerous public and private collections, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; DeMenil Collection in Houston; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Maatschappij Arti Et Amicitiae, Amsterdam, Holland; Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton; Tennessee State Museum, Nashville; Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; and Newark Museum, Newark.

Esmaa Mohamoud’s exhibition Let Them Consume Me In the Light examines what Mohamoud calls “Black body politics”—a web of interconnected personal, social, economic, and historical factors that shape how Blackness is perceived by Black people and non-Black people alike. Four paradoxical sculptural phenomena fill the gallery: an elegant but inaccessibly tall peacock chair; a marvelous but un-drivable pink Cadillac; an enchanting but lifeless prairie of black steel dandelions; and the visages of three young African girls, tenderly carved from shea butter. The title alludes to the inevitability that Black cultural products and their creators will be exploited by majoritarian society. “They’re already gonna consume us, it might as well be out in the open,” Mohamoud says. “They should consume us in the light of the truth, in the light of racial injustice, in the light of the things we don’t usually want to talk about. There are many lights this exhibition can hold.”

Mohamoud’s critically acclaimed solo exhibition To Play in the Face of Certain Defeat debuted at Museum London in Ontario and is currently on view at the Art Gallery of Alberta, following iterations at the Art Galleries of Ottawa, Winnipeg, and Hamilton (Ontario). Other recent exhibitions featuring Mohamoud’s work include Garmenting: Costume and Contemporary Art, Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY, USA; In These Truths, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY, USA; and Esmaa Mohamoud: It Cannot Always Be Night, Arsenal Contemporary, New York, NY, USA; as well as exhibitions at the Royal Ontario Museum; Museum of Fine Arts Montreal; and Weatherspoon Art Museum, UNCG, Greensboro, NC, USA, among others. Works by Mohamoud are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada; Art Gallery of Ontario; Weatherspoon Museum; Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan; Museum London; and University of Victoria Legacy Art Galleries, among others. Mohamoud was an Artist-in-Residence in Kehinde Wiley’s renowned Black Rock Senegal residency program in Dakar, Senegal in 2021.

Allana Clarke’s exhibition I Feel Everything is the artist’s first solo exhibition to focus exclusively on her series of sculptural paintings made from Salon Pro 30 Sec. Super Hair Bond Glue, a material that has become signature to her practice. To create the works, Clarke first pours thousands of 8-oz. bottles of the gloopy, black liquid onto mesh screens. She then wrestles with the material over the course of weeks as it slowly dries. Clawing, pulling, twisting, and scraping at the gradually-less-mutable surface with her bare hands and feet, Clarke imposes her physical and emotional will onto the substance. The undertaking transforms her medium’s appearance and value—a punk subversion of its usual function, which is linked to systems that aim to negate aesthetics of Blackness. “As I developed the works I was thinking deeply about my relationship to the color black, approaching it as a space for discovery, experimentation, and multiplicity,” Clarke says. “This is a type of meditative space.”

Clarke’s first institutional solo exhibition, A Particular Fantasy, opened in the fall of 2022 with collaborating installations at Art Omi and Usdan Gallery. Other recent exhibitions include Realms of Refuge, a group exhibition at Kavi Gupta | Elizabeth St.; the second FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Oh Gods of Dust & Rainbows, Cleveland, OH; the Bauhaus Centennial, Bauhaus Now: Is Modernity an Attitude; as well as exhibitions at Gibney Dance, New York; Invisible-Exports, New York; New School’s Glass Box Theater, New York; FRAC in Nantes, France; and SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, Germany. In addition to completing a NXTHVN fellowship, Clarke has been an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center, Lighthouse Works, and Yaddo, and has received several grants, including the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship, Franklin Furnace Fund, and Puffin Foundation Grant. Clarke is an assistant professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. She earned her BFA in Photography from New Jersey City University in 2011 and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Practice from MICA’s Mount Royal School of Art in 2014.

Suchitra Mattai’s Osmosis: In the Face of the Sea is an expanded and extended edition of the artist’s groundbreaking solo exhibition Osmosis. Thinking about the saltwater ocean migrations that have shaped her family’s heritage, Mattai has both a scientific and a poetic interest in osmosis, a process that involves the migration of water molecules from one region to another. In a manner of speaking, osmosis is about equilibrium, or the transferral of something to achieve a new balance. Salt is an osmotic trigger; throughout the exhibition, Mattai employs salt as both a sculptural medium and a chemical instigator of aesthetic transformation. Conceived as an exhibition that would evolve in order to allow a living examination of its theme, this second manifestation of Osmosis introduces multiple new works, including three new large-scale wall tapestries woven from vintage saris.

Recent exhibitions featuring Mattai include Forecast Form, MCA Chicago, IL, USA; In the Adjacent Possible, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI, USA; Reorient, Wing Luke Museum, Seattle, WA, USA; Suchitra Mattai: Breathing Room, Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID, USA; State of the Art 2020, Crystal Bridges Museum/the Momentary, Bentonville, AR, USA; Sharjah Biennial 14, Sharjah, UAE; and Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA. Mattai has additionally shown at the Green Foundation, Miami, FL, USA; Colorado Fine Arts Center, Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO, USA; Center for Visual Arts, Metropolitan State University of Denver, CO, USA; and San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX, USA. Her work is in the collections of Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville, AR, USA; Jorge Pérez; Olivia Walton; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, USA; Kiran Nader Museum of Art, Delhi, India; Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL, USA; TIA Collection, Santa Fe, NM, USA; and Taylor Art Collection, Denver, CO, USA; among many others. She has been reviewed in publications such as Hyperallergic, The Boston Globe, Widewalls, and Wallpaper Magazine. Mattai received an MFA in painting and drawing and an MA in South Asian art from the University of Pennsylvania, PA.

We are also proud to exhibit a selection of major new large-scale paintings by Alfred Conteh, whose portraits capture the people he meets in and around Atlanta, Georgia, where he lives and works. Conteh paints their outward countenance—their body, posture, and fashion—wIth photorealistic perfection; his acrylic mediums, meanwhile, are augmented with earthen elements like soil, concrete, metal dust, and melted urethane in order to arrive at a deeper truth—elemental evidence of toughness amid dereliction.

We will also exhibit at EXPO Chicago 2023 works by some of the most influential artists on the contemporary vanguard, including Beverly Fishman, whose radiant relief paintings offer an aesthetically stunning and conceptually rigorous critique of humanity’s complex relationship with the chemical sublime; Michi Meko, whose sumptuous, layered abstractions express the ecstacy of absconding into the physical wilderness and the wilderness of the mind; José Lerma, creator of audacious paintings as they elevate the mundane and trivialize the grand, crafting a visual world that is both celebratory and absurd; Kour Pour, a British-Iranian-American artist whose visual language is informed by longstanding, global traditions of intercultural exchange, intersecting a wide range of material and aesthetic conventions that allow for a remapping of the standard understanding of “Eastern/Western” dichotomies; Miya Ando, a multidisciplinary abstract artist whose works reference the ephemerality of nature and the transitory nature of existence by transforming materials that convey a sense of permanence—such as steel, glass, and aluminum— into embodiments of impermanence; Gerald Williams an American painter whose work explores culture, place and identity from a global perspective. Williams is one of the original five founders of AFRICOBRA, an internationally influential Black arts collective formed on the South Side of Chicago in 1967; Sherman Beck is a Chicago-based painter who was among the original ten members of AFRICOBRA, a foundational Black arts collective formed on the South Side of Chicago in 1967; and Armani Howard a multi-disciplinary, African American-Thai artist whose work cross-examines the roles of memory, nostalgia, and folkloric narratives in the creation and preservation of identity and 

Recent major exhibitions of Fishman's work include FEELS LIKE LOVE, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; Recovery, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI, USA; I Dream of Sleep, Miles McEnery, New York, NY, USA; Future Perfect, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; Double Edged: Geometric Abstraction Then and Now, curated by Dr. Emily Stamey, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, USA; DOSE, curated by Nick Cave, CUE Art Foundation, New York, NY, USA; Pill Spill, Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, MI, USA; and Beverly Fishman: In Sickness and in Health, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, USA. Fishman has received numerous awards, including the 2018 Anonymous Was A Woman Award; the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; and the NEA Fellowship Grant. Work by Fishman is included in the collections of the MacArthur Foundation, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Chrysler Museum of Art, and many others. Fishman served as the head of painting and as artist-in-residence at the Cranbrook Academy of Art for twenty-seven years.

Michi Meko is a multidisciplinary artist whose rigorous studio practice is grounded in a material, metaphorical, and philosophical examination of what he calls “the African American experience of navigating public spaces, particularly in the American South, while remaining buoyant within them.” Incorporating romanticized found objects as well as the visual language of mapping, flags, and wayfinding into his work, Meko constructs transcendent aesthetic spaces into which the viewer’s psyche is free to wander.

Meko is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and the Atlanta Artadia Award, and was a finalist for the 2019 Hudgens Prize. Recent exhibitions of Meko's work include Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground, Kavi Gupta. Chicago, IL; The Dirty South, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, VA; Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; Michi Meko: Black and Blur, Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Atlanta GA; Michi Meko: It Doesn’t Prepare You for Arrival, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA), Atlanta, GA; Michi Meko: Before We Blast off: The Journey of Divine Forces, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA and Abstraction Today, MOCA GA, Atlanta, GA. His work is held in the collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; King & Spalding, Atlanta, GA; Scion (Toyota Motor Corporation), Los Angeles, CA; MetroPark USA Inc., Atlanta, GA; and CW Network, Atlanta, GA, among others.

José Lerma’s practice is formally rooted in an investigation of painting in the expanded field. His exhibitions often include elaborate installations that incorporate such everyday items as office materials, musical instruments, and home furnishings. Conceptually, Lerma attempts to collapse the historical with the autobiographical, making works that are part art history and part personal mythology. Several of Lerma’s recurring themes deal with the tension between the heroic and the pathetic, as well as the rise and fall of great figures. His research examines the vast network of sociological, political, and economic forces that have shaped, and continue to shape, contemporary culture. His subjects have included international figures, such as American politician John Kerry, economist Milton Friedman, and King Charles II of Spain; pop culture icons, such as Julio Iglesias; everyday bureaucrats, bankers, and administrators; personal relations, such as his mother and father; and iconic religious scenes, such as the Last Supper.

Lerma was born in Spain and grew up in Puerto Rico. He earned an MFA from the University of Wisconsin Madison and BA from Tulane University, and attended the CORE Residency Program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, ME. He lives and works in Chicago, IL, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. His work has been in solo exhibitions at the Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de San Juan, Puerto Rico, among others; as well as in group exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; Institute Valecia d’art Modern, Spain; Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico; Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; and Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX, and others. His work has been written about extensively in the press, including in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Artforum.

Kour Pour is a British-Iranian-American artist whose visual language is informed by longstanding, global traditions of intercultural exchange. Pour’s works encompass diverse subject matter and culturally specific references, ranging from Persian carpets to ukiyo-e prints, and Western abstraction to Eastern landscape painting. These references are used as starting points for his paintings, in which a source image is often cropped, abstracted, or adjusted in palette to create vivid, intricate, and layered painting surfaces.

Miya Ando is a multidisciplinary abstract artist whose works reference the ephemerality of nature and the transitory nature of existence.  Ando presents the titles of her works in Japanese and English. During her time living in Japan, she researched literary and historical texts, compiling poetic Japanese descriptions of natural phenomena. Present in the Japanese descriptions are nuanced layers of thought often lacking in the English translation. These bi-lingual titles convey the sense of duality Ando experiences living between two cultures.

Ando’s work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at The Asia Society Museum, Houston; The Noguchi Museum, New York; Savannah College Of Art and Design Museum, Savannah; The Nassau County Museum, Roslyn Harbor; and The American University Museum, Washington DC. Her work has also been included in recent group exhibitions at The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Haus Der Kunst, Munich; The Bronx Museum; and The Queens Museum of Art, NY. Ando’s work is included in the public collections of  LACMA; The Nassau County Museum; The Corning Museum of Glass; The Detroit Institute of Arts; The Luft Museum; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; The Santa Barbara Museum of Art; The Museum of Art and History;  among other public institutions as well as in numerous private collections. Ando has been the recipient of several grants and awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant Award, and has produced numerous public commissions, most notably a thirty-foot-tall sculpture built from World Trade Center steel installed in Olympic Park in London to mark the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, for which she was nominated for a DARC Award in Best Light Art Installation. Ando was also commissioned to create artwork for the historic Philip Johnson Glass House, New Canaan, CT. The artist holds a bachelor’s degree in East Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, studied East Asian Studies at Yale University and Stanford University, and apprenticed with a Master Metalsmith in Japan.

Williams’ paintings depict a polyrhythmic visual representation of life at the intersection of figuration and abstraction. Defined by what he calls “mimesis at midpoint,” his images unfold in a liminal space between what we can see and describe objectively, and what must be thought or felt intuitively.

In distilling the visual languages of the various places, cultures and identities he has encountered in order to express the essence of reality in an aesthetically contemplative way. The quiet nights in Nairobi; the rich colors of African clothing and architecture; the dynamic rhythms of life in the country and the city: all of these things affect his approach, and inform his polyrhythmic visual voice.

Howard’s interest in the ways storytelling is used to construct identity developed early in life. The loss of his father when Howard was a young child led him to search for information about his father’s life and history. “Through learning more about him I realized the connection of how an individual’s passing, unspoken creeds and the memories that are shared begins to dictate their Identity,” Howard says. “I began to question the roles that help shape identity and how they can mold the beliefs in one’s heritage.” Thinking about what that dynamic means to a family over generations, Howard draws heavily upon family folklore in his work. His nebulous, conceptually layered compositions depict an intersectional space between objective reality and the more speculative mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of life.

Howard’s work is included in the collection of School Of The Art Institute Of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA, among others; SKIN + MASKS, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA ; Juxtapoz X Adidas: The Showcase;The Times, Chicago, IL, USA; Black Creativity: Artists, Aesthetics, And Movements; Indiana University Northwest; Gallery for Contemporary Art, Gary, IN, USA; AND Save Money Save Life Fundraiser, Lincoln Hall, Chicago, Illinois. 

Watt attended the Institute of American Indian Arts with a focus on museum studies and studio arts, and earned her MFA from Yale. Her work is included in numerous influential private and institutional collections, including those of Albright-Knox Art Gallery Buffalo, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art Bentonville, AR; Denver Art Museum, CO; The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, NY; The National Gallery of Art Washington, DC; The Smithsonian American Art Museum; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, among scores of others.