Matter of Fact: Material as a Political Act : Kavi Gupta | Washington Blvd. Fl. 2

Alexandre Diop is a Franco-Senegalese abstract artist whose process is guided by the physical realities of the materials he employs in his works. Using everyday objects such as books, photographs, metal, and wood, as well as elements like animal hair, fire, and rust, Diop expresses sympathy with the traditions of the Arte Povera movement

He recalls once early in his education making a painting on a wooden door and being frustrated with it, until he pasted a scrap of paper to the surface. The certainty of the paper—what was expressed by its reality without the need for any elaboration from him as an artist—made an impression that forever altered Diop’s understanding of his work.

Otero’s approach to art making combines methods of formation and deformation, a way of working that results in images and objects that seem to be in a continual state of becoming. Among his most illustrative bodies of work are his so-called “paint skins,” which are made by painting on glass then, once dry, scraping off the paint in sheets like peeled layers of skin. Those peeled paint skins can then be rearranged on a canvas to create a layered, textured abstract composition, which can be interpreted as a re-mixed material memory of its own creation.

Recent major exhibitions of Otero’s work include Diario, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; The Otherside of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art, Perez Art Museum Miami, FL; Elegies, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; Everything and Nothing, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX; and Lago, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; and Coffee, Rum, Sugar, Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA. Otero’s work is included in the collections of the Berezdivin Collection, Puerto Rico; Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; DePaul University Museum, Chicago, IL; Istanbul Modern, Istanbul, Turkey; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Margulies Collection, Miami, FL; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; UBS Art Collection, Chicago, IL; and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA, among many others. Otero attended the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico, and received his BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has completed residencies at Vannucci Artist Residency, Umbria, Italy, and Anderson Ranch, Aspen, Colorado. He lives and works in New York.

Working with ceramics, papier-mâché, paint, found materials and furniture, Jessica Jackson Hutchins makes work that explores the intimate and human nature of co-dependency, mutual existence, love and family. Creating spilling, globular forms, her painterly sculptures function as vessels in the same way that the human body does. Her masses of fleshy, labored clay and pulpy paper reveal hints of their formation as they lean and sit atop tattered and weathered sofas, chairs and tables. Found and repurposed materials, such as used pillowcases, also find their way into her work, constructing an internal language and exposing their contact with humanity through a history of wear. Jessica Jackson Hutchins lives and works in Portland, Oregon. 

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.

A solo exhibition of Yanko’s work was presented in 2023 at The Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA. Other recent exhibitions include Set It Off, Curated by Mickalene Thomas & Racquel Chevremont, The Parrish Museum, Water Mill, NY; as well as exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (Parallels and Peripheries, curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah); and University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum (Life During WarTime, curated by Christian Viveros-Faune). Yanko’s work is included in the collections of Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach (Beth Rudin DeWoody), Espacio Tacuari, Buenos Aires (Juan Vergez and Patricia Pearson), and the Rubell Museum of Art, Miami (Don and Mera Rubell), among many others. The 2021 Artist in Residence at the Rubell Museum of Art in 2021, Yanko was named Art Forum’s “Critic’s Pick” in 2019 and was featured in 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow, published by Thames & Hudson.

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. More succinctly than any other artist of his generation, Brown captured both the tenderness and the hubris of his home nation, even as that same nation seemed unwilling to create a safe space for him to be truly free. As a gay man born in the Deep South, Brown had a crystal clear understanding of otherism, and of the insidious reach of American puritanism and political hypocrisy. When he was diagnosed as HIV positive in 1988, he joined the tens of millions of other victims of humanity’s other ongoing pandemic who even now are often a target for scorn and shame.

Recent exhibitions of Cole's work include The B-Sides (1989-2022), Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA, 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.