Alfred Conteh: Viewing Room: Kavi Gupta | Washington Blvd. Fl. 1E

Kavi Gupta is pleased to present a viewing room of new and recent works by artist Alfred Conteh on the occasion of Chicago Exhibition Week. The presentation brings together recent paintings and works that reflect Conteh’s ongoing engagement with identity, memory, displacement, and the complexities of contemporary life. Through portraiture and richly layered compositions, Conteh considers the individual within broader social and historical contexts. This viewing room offers an opportunity to encounter Conteh’s recent practice alongside works that demonstrate the continued development of his distinctive visual language.

 

Alfred Conteh’s Alright, Soogi depicts a woman seen from behind, standing with her hands resting firmly on her hips. Her body is rendered with striking detail, set against a fragmented, heavily worked environment of layered gray, blue, and muted green tones. Subtle gold lines trace her stretch marks. The figure’s pose suggests confidence and self-possession, while the obscured face denies direct identification and shifts attention toward the physicality of the body. Conteh heightens this tension through the contrast between the figure’s smooth, meticulously rendered form and the distressed, abstracted environment surrounding her. Areas of scraping, layering, and gestural marks interrupt the illusion of depth, creating a psychologically charged space that feels simultaneously recognizable and unstable. The Nike sneakers ground the figure within the present. The result is an image concerned with presence, perception, and the psychological weight carried by the body.

 

 

Alfred Conteh has developed a significant relationship with the Peoria Riverfront Museum, where his work has been presented since 2022. His portrait Malik and Marquis was featured in the museum’s American Revolutionaries: Art & Disruption, and in 2024 the museum commissioned Our Greatest Inheritance, a monumental portrait of a Peoria family.

 

Conteh’s 2025 exhibition Strangers/Kin: The Lens of Alfred Conteh brought together this commission alongside portraits including El, 2024 and Bred, 2024, of subjects from Atlanta and Peoria, marking an important expansion of his practice beyond his longtime home city.

 

 

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Conteh’s portrait of psychiatrist and theorist Dr. Frances Cress Welsing presents the figure through a densely layered psychological landscape. The title Fruitful (Dr. Frances Cress Welsing), 2026 suggests the generative force of Welsing’s ideas, while the smaller faces and forms embedded within her hair evoke the transmission of thought, memory, and cultural inheritance across generations. Conteh’s illusionistic treatment allows the portrait to operate simultaneously as likeness and interior world, transforming the physical figure into a vessel for accumulated histories and ideas.

 

In Self Portrait (Dr. John Henrik Clarke), 2026 Conteh approaches the historian and scholar John Henrik Clarke through a portrait that collapses the boundary between individual identity and historical memory. Clarke’s face is presented alongside an image embedded within his forehead, creating a visual suggestion of knowledge carried within the mind and body. The work’s title further complicates the distinction between artist, subject, and historical consciousness, positioning Conteh’s own act of looking as part of a larger psychological and intellectual inheritance.

 

Alfred Conteh’s Ours, 2025 presents a figure dressed in a vivid yellow sweatshirt, standing with their hands placed firmly at their hips. The saturated garment is set against a richly textured ground of oxidized atomized steel dust, acrylic, charcoal, and conte, creating a striking contrast between the brightness of the clothing and the rust-toned, weathered surface. Conteh’s detailed rendering gives the fabric and hands a palpable physical presence, while the obscured head and face shift emphasis toward the figure’s posture, clothing, and gesture. The work carries a sense of confidence and self-possession, while its material contrasts create a more layered meditation on identity, belonging, and the visual language of contemporary American life.

In Made in America, 2025 Conteh depicts a figure wearing a prominent star-shaped pendant inscribed with “MADE IN AMERICA.” The figure is rendered with meticulous attention to the textures of the skin, clothing, and jewelry, while the surrounding surface is built up through acrylic, atomized bronze dust, charcoal, and conte. The warm metallic tones and fragmented marks of the background contrast with the cool, monochromatic rendering of the figure, creating a tension between realism and abstraction. The pendant introduces an immediately recognizable American symbol, while Conteh’s treatment of the figure and surrounding material gives the image a more psychologically charged reading of identity, representation, and the complicated meanings attached to the idea of “America.”