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Kavi Gupta is thrilled to announce the return of the Felix Art Fair from February 27 - March, 3 2024, at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles.We are eager to present a curated collection of standout work from artist, Nikko Washington, Theaster Gates, Miya Ando, James Little, Jessica Stockholder, Manish Nai, Alfred Conteh, Willie Cole, Kennedy Yanko, Tomokazu Matsuyama, Roger Brown, and spotlighting the distinctive artistry of Devan Shimoyama. Returning to the fair warmly fosters meaningful interactions, celebrating and amplifying diverse voices in contemporary art. Join us for an enriching experience at the intersection of creativity and conversation.
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Devan Shimoyama’s visually scintillating artworks stop people in their tracks. Clad in such finery as fur, feathers, glitter, rhinestones, and sequins, his paintings and sculptures emit a magical and joyous aura. Viewers easily enchanted by beautiful things might get lost in the shimmering artistry of Shimoyama’s expertly crafted cosmetic veils. Those whose eyes and minds are willing to travel beyond the surface subterfuge of glitter, flowers, and jewels gain precious entry into a complex world of mystery, introspection, rhapsody, and desire.Shimoyama’s painting practice is rooted in explorations of his personal identity and experiences. Mobilizing mythology, spiritual traditions, and the compositional strategies of classical painters such as Francisco Goya and Caravaggio, he crafts heroic and sanguine depictions of the Black, queer, male body. Many of the men in Shimoyama's paintings literally have jewels in their eyes, endowing them with a tearful, mystified expression suggesting internal suffering.Shimoyama has stated that he wants the figures in his work are perceived as "both desirable and desirous." He is aware of the politics of queer culture, and the ways in which those politics relate to Black American culture. These elements come together in his works in a way that is both celebratory and complicated.
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Other major current and recent exhibitions include Devan Shimoyama in The Regional, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, USA; When We See Us, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa; Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows, at FRONT International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH, USA; All the Rage, at Kunstpalais, Erlangen, Germany, Shimoyama’s debut European solo museum exhibition; A Counterfeit Gift Wrapped in Fire, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; Untitled (For Tamir), a single work exhibition in the Spotlight Gallery at The Rockwell Museum, Corning, NY, USA; Black Gentleman and Midnight Rumination, a major multi-museum exhibition at The Regional, co-organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH, USA and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, USA; Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art, Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY, USA; Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; Tell Me Your Story, Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands; Getting to Know You, Cleveland Institute of Art, OH, USA; We Named Her Gladys, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; The Barbershop Project, CulturalDC, Washington, DC, USA; Fictions, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, USA; and Translating Valence: Redefining Black Male Identity, Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids, MI, USA. Shimoyama was awarded the Al Held Fellowship at the Yale School of Art in 2013.
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Willie Cole is a contemporary American sculptor, printer, and conceptual artist. His work combines references to everyday consumer objects and appropriation from African and African American imagery.Cole is well known for his Dada and Surrealist readymades, which assemble and transform ordinary domestic and used objects such as irons, ironing boards, high-heeled shoes, hair dryers, bicycle parts, wooden matches, lawn jockeys, and other discarded appliances and hardware. His long-running Mother and Child series of assemblages uses high-heeled shoes to convey the thematic figures. The forms created by the well-worn shoes recall traditional African sculpture.
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Willie Cole
Minus 20, 2006Scorched plywood
43 1/8 x 27 1/4 x 2 3/4 in.
109.5 x 69.2 x 7 cm -
Recent exhibitions of Cole's work include To Reclaim, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; New Concepts in Printmaking 2: Willie Cole, MoMA, New York, NY, USA; Reconfiguring an African Icon: Odes to the Mask by Modern and Contemporary Artists from Three Continents, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA; Chicago, Surrealism: The Conjured Life, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, USA; and Afro: Black Identity in America and Brazil, Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, NM, USA. Cole’s work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; MoMA, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Wake Forest University Student Union Collection of Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC; and many others.
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James Little is a master in the field of contemporary American abstract painting. In an age that frequently trades durability and patience for ephemerality and instant gratification, Little might be seen as an outlier. A careful, precise, disciplined perfectionist who emphasizes personal improvement over outside recognition, Little offers an alternative definition of influencer to a culture obsessed with quick returns and fame for fame's sake.Little’s distinctive visual position is based on a rigorous, life long academic study of color theory, pictorial design, and painting techniques. Rooted in simplicity, his work centers geometric shapes, patterns and emotive color relationships.
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James Little
Checkered Past, 2017Raw pigment on canvas
33 1/4 x 41 1/2 x 1 1/2 in
84.5 x 105.4 x 3.8 cm -
Little holds a BFA from the Memphis Academy of Art and an MFA from Syracuse University. He 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. His work has been included in The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA, curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver and traveling to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, with forthcoming catalogue. 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. 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.
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Jessica Stockholder is an internationally acclaimed visual artist whose practice defines the vanguard of the Expanded Field of Painting. She is an inductee to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Anonymous Was A Woman, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others.Stockholder formulates three-dimensional pictures in space, which interact in unpredictable ways with the environments they occupy and explore how perception relates to feelings of chaos and control. The work employs the visual strategies of painting, sculpture, and installation—though it also resists the limitations such terms imply. Stockholder mobilizes consumer products and industrial materials as a way to confront the threat they pose to human existence, and to critique the superficial relationship people have with technology and consumption. By incorporating such concepts and objects into her practice, Stockholder imbues the work with myriad levels of meaning and political resonance.
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Stockholder’s work has been exhibited in many of the world’s most influential art venues, including Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Dia Center for the Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Venice Biennale. It is included in such internationally renowned museum collections as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York, USA; Centre Pompidou (Musée National d'Art Moderne), Paris, France; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA; the British Museum, London, UK; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, USA; The Art Institute of Chicago, IL, USA; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Netherlands; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA, USA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, USA; The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, CA, USA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA; Carré d’Art, Nîmes, France; Centraal Museum, Utrecht, Netherlands; GAM - Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, Italy; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany; mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria; National Gallery of Australia, Parkes, Australia; Städel Museum, Frankfurt, Germany; and Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia, Canada, among many others. Her public artworks have been commissioned by museums, municipalities, and corporations around the world.In addition to earning her BFA from the University of Victoria in Canada and her MFA from Yale University, she has been awarded two honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees: one from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2010, and one from Columbia College in 2013. Stockholder is currently the Raymond W. & Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago, a position she accepted in 2011, after 12 years as Director of the Sculpture Department at the Yale School of Art.
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Nikko Washington is a multimedia artist from the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. His work is rooted in portraiture, and frequently centers the artists, activists, and influencers who have made an impact on his community. A believer in the idea that if people don’t learn from their history they’ll repeat it, Washington makes work that archives and contextualizes the present moment through the lens of mythology and storytelling.The subject of fighting appears frequently in Washington’s work. A trained martial artist and boxer, he portrays legendary fighters like Muhammad Ali, Floyd Mayweather, and Mike Tyson as larger than life figures emulating the gladiators of the past. Boxing is also one lens through which Washington addresses ideas surrounding racial identity and equity. Referring to the 1910 title fight between Jack Johnson, who was Black, and the white fighter James J. Jeffries, a.k.a. The Great White Hope, Washington says, “With racial issues, American nature sort of has this caveat of both sides betting on each other to lose.”
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Nikko Washington
Aunt Nancy, 2023Oil and spray paint on canvas
40 x 30 in.
101.6 x 76.2 cm -
Washington earned his BFA at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design and the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Recent exhibitions include, School Of The Art Institute of Chicago BFA Exhibition, Sullivan Gallery, Chicago, IL; Solo Exhibition, The Bad Sleep Well, Chicago, IL; Y:ou Gallery, Solo Exhibition, Chicago, IL; 53 Till Infinity, Logan Center Cafe, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Artist and Residency, Soho House Chicago, Chicago, IL; Group Exhibition, A Legacy On Our Own Terms Heaven Gallery, Chicago, IL; Group Exhibition, Something About Us, Anthony Gallery, Chicago, IL; Group Exhibition, Neighborhood Gallery, Innersect, Shanghai, CN; and Group Exhibitions, Skin and Masks, I-III, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL. -
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Miya Ando is a multidisciplinary abstract artist whose works reference the ephemerality of nature and the transitory nature of existence.
Ando's images and forms reference such fleeting stuff as clouds, moonlight, tides, and the seasons. Her materials—such as steel, glass, and aluminum—convey a sense of durability and strength. Transformed by Ando, materials related to permanence become embodiments of impermanence.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.
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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.
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Manish Nai
Untitled, 2003Collage and jute on canvas
24 x 30 in
61 x 76.2 cm -
Nai represented India in the 9th Shanghai Biennale, Mumbai City Pavilion, Shanghai, China, and is a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award winner. His work has been exhibited by some of the most influential institutions in the world, including Het Noordbrabants Museum, Netherlands; Fondation Fernet-Branca, Saint-Louis, France; Devi Art Foundation, Kasturbhai Lalbhai Museum, Ahmedabad, India; Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, India; NTU Center for Contemporary Art Singapore, Gillman Barracks, Singapore; Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland; The Sculpture Park at Madhavendra Palace, Nahargrah Fort, Jaipur, India; DR. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, India; Art Science Museum, Singapore; Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Kolkata, India; National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, India; and Beppu Museum, Beppu, Japan. Nai earned a Diploma in Drawing and Painting from the L.S. Raheja School of Art in Mumbai, India.
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Roger Brown is renowned for using a pop aesthetic to investigate a range of sociopolitical issues. Late-capitalist critic, 20th century Shakespeare, Pictorial Prophet of the Prairie: Brown summarized, glamorized, and satirized the nightly preoccupations and daily desires that define what it means to be an American.Brown’s work is of startling contemporary relevance, cleverly approaching many topics: the natural and built environment, disaster, religion, popular culture, the art world, art history, eroticism, and sociopolitical concerns, from modern warfare to mortality during the HIV/AIDS crisis. In a world ever more dominated and challenged by the American myths that Brown so dutifully and brilliantly addressed in his work, we are called now more than ever to look to the humor, beauty, and intelligence of this artist who worked beyond the boundaries of his own time.
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The Roger Brown Study Collection, maintained by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, makes Brown’s prolific art collection and archive available to the public. Brown’s paintings have recently been featured in group exhibitions at the Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy, and MoMA PS1, New York, USA, and his Virtual Still Life works were highlighted in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Arts & Design, New York. The artist’s work is included in notable private and public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, National Gallery of Art, and The National Portrait Gallery.
Kavi Gupta | Felix Art Fair LA 2024: HOLLYWOOD ROOSEVELT HOTEL, LOS ANGELES, CA | SUITE 1210
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