Kavi Gupta, The Armory Show 2021

While curating our booth for The Armory Show 2021, we took care to center artworks that, because of their dynamic presence, are experienced best in person. To that end, we have included luxuriant, impasto abstractions by Young-Il Ahn (1934–2020); deft, material examinations of the American caste system by Alfred Conteh; luminous pill reliefs by Beverly Fishman; richly textured, multimedia wall works by Jeffrey Gibson; luminescent, pop-inspired paintings and sculptures from Deborah Kass; a defining work of mini-maximalist portraiture from José Lerma; a selection of extraordinary, geometric encaustic paintings by one of the latest artists to join our program, the critically acclaimed abstract painter James Little; and a suite of rarely seem, seminal early abstractions by Clare Rojas.

 

We are also proud to present a selection of key works from artists spotlighted in our summer solo shows, including Haitian-Canadian artist Manuel Mathieu, whose exhibition Negroland: A Landscape of Desires premiered this summer at Kavi Gupta | Elizabeth St.; British-Iranian, Los Angeles-based artist Kour Pour, whose exhibition Familiar Spirits is currently on view at Kavi Gupta | Washington Blvd.; and South African artist Mary Sibande, whose exhibition Unhand Me, Demon! recently inaugurated our new street-level gallery space at Kavi Gupta | Washington Blvd.; as well as a selection of new works from a group of emerging and mid-career artists new to our program, including Alisa Sikelianos-Carter, Basil Kincaid, Tomokazu Matsuyama, Suchitra Mattai, and Michi Meko, all of whom are featured in the group exhibition Realms of Refuge, currently on view at Kavi Gupta | Elizabeth St.

 

Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972, USA ) combines Native American traditions with the visual languages of Modernism to explore the contemporary confluence of personal identity, culture, history, and international social narratives. Gibson is a member of the Chocktaw and Cherokee nations. He currently lives and works in Hudson, New York.

A first-generation Japanese American who lives and works in New York City, Tomokazu Matsuyama (b. 1976, Japan) has developed a singular aesthetic grounded in an elegant expression of what he refers to as “the struggle of reckoning the familiar local with the familiar global.” As a bi-cultural visual artist, he is keenly aware of the nomadic diaspora, a community of wandering people who seek to understand their place in a world full of contrasting visual and cultural dialects.

Deborah Kass (b. 1952, USA) is an American artist whose work explores the intersection of pop culture, art history, and the construction of self. Kass is a fan of popular culture and a rigorous student of art history, and considers all of the existing artistic content as useful material from which to draw.

Alfred Conteh (b. 1975, USA) is a painter and sculptor based in Atlanta, GA. His mother is African American, and his father is from Sierra Leone, West Africa. Conteh explores his identity and personal history from a number of different perspectives. 

 

He is concerned with the way African Americans are dealing with disparities that have been affecting their communities for generations, especially in the southern United States. He is also interested in the wider view of the entire African diaspora. 

James Little (b. 1952, USA) is an American abstract artist whose distinctive aesthetic language is rooted in geometric shapes and patterns, flat surfaces, and emotive color relationships. Little utilizes a method similar to the encaustic painting technique used by ancient Egyptian and Greek artists, blending handmade pigments with hot beeswax.

 

While developing his unique position within contemporary abstraction, Little has devoted decades to rigorous academic study of color theory, pictorial design, and painting techniques. His practice embodies the complementary forces of simplicity and complexity.

While Manuel Mathieu (b. 1986, Haiti) has developed an aesthetic trajectory that may be easily traced to his Haitian upbringing, his work articulates his positionality from a multitude of realities and perspectives.

Reposing on his own multiplicity, the abstractness of his work conveys the abundance in existing at the intersection of racial, geographical, and cultural identities.

Mathieu’s abstract imagery taps into the unrepresentable and elusive—he offers emotional and spiritual nuances that post-structuralist critiques neglect. He presents historical paintings that rely on emotive and speculative thinking as a form of knowledge production. He abandons figurative or didactic western traditions for a more interactive mode of interpretation where the viewers are actively participating in formulating their under-standing of the work.

Young-Il Ahn (b. 1934, Korea) developed a distinctive oeuvre defined by meticulous, abstract paintings that explore his relationship with beauty, nature, and music. Ahn’s most famous body of work, the Water series, has been associated with Dansaekhwa, an aesthetic position specific to Korea characterized by the expression of natural processes through a monochromatic palette.

 

Ahn was born in 1934 in Gaesong, a city now located in North Korea, which was then considered part of colonial Japan. His first mentors were his father, who was a painter and art teacher, and his mother, a musician. Ahn’s early paintings tended towards expressionist figuration, but after relocating to Los Angeles in 1966, he became enamored with the famous Southern California light, especially the interplay of sunlight on surfaces. His first California paintings were semi-abstract, light-filled studies of beach umbrellas, sails, birds, and musicians.

Beverly Fishman (b. 1955, USA) employs a variety of techniques to explore technological, scientific, and biological systems of perception and representation, instigating constructive conversations about the ways people see their bodies and minds and form their identities.

 

Her most illustrious works engage with the visual language of the medical industrial complex. Her highly polished Pill reliefs utilize pharmaceutical forms as the basis for seemingly abstract compositions that radiate with color.

Michi Meko (b. 1974, USA) is a multidisciplinary artist whose works engage metaphorically and abstractly with the paradoxes and contradictions that have shaped his personal history and the shared history of Black Americans, particularly in the American South.

 

Meko nearly drowned in 2015—an experience that continues to resonate within his studio practice today. He says, “Inviting this life-changing event’s influence into my studio practice, my recent paintings and sculptures focus on the African American experience of navigating public spaces while remaining buoyant within them.”

For Clare Rojas (b. 1976, USA), storytelling manifests in many different ways: sometimes visually, as a painting, drawing, or sculpture; other times musically, as a song. Yet one similarity Rojas has noticed between these various forms of expression has to do with reduction. Her songwriting pares down the essence of a story to something that can be conveyed in minutes, just as the essence of form and line in her abstract visual compositions is reduced to an examination of the tension of balance.

Suchitra Mattai (b. 1973, Guyana) blends painting, sculpture and installation with methods suggestive of domestic labor which she learned from her grandmother, such as sewing, embroidery and crocheting, to tell visual stories that touch on her Indo-Caribbean lineage. The work addresses such topics as the legacy of colonialism, and relationships between culture and gender roles. Mattai frequently uses found materials in her pieces that have their own embedded meanings, creating a call and response between the materials, the topics addressed in the work, and processes involved in the work’s creation.

British-Iranian artist Kour Pour (b. 1987, UK) has quickly developed a reputation for meticulously composed and delicately rendered artworks which intersect diverse material and aesthetic traditions, allowing for a remapping of the standard understanding of “Eastern/Western” cultural exchange. 

 

Pour was born in Exeter, England. His father owned a small carpet shop, and Pour would spend time there as a child. He also often traveled to Los Angeles to visit family on his father’s side, and he ultimately attended Otis College of Art and Design (BFA, 2010). In Los Angeles, he was exposed to hip-hop and became interested in the idea of sampling as it is practiced in music production, and how he might apply a similar practice in his artwork. 

Mary Sibande (b. 1982, South Africa) is a sculptor, painter, and installation artist whose work not only interrogates the current intersections of race, gender, and labor in South Africa, it actively rewrites her own family’s legacy of forced domestic work imposed by the then-Apartheid state. Through photography and sculpture, Sibande employs the human form as a vehicle for a focused critique of stereotypical depictions of women, particularly Black women in South Africa. For Sibande, the body is the site where history is contested and where Sibande’s own fantasies can play out.

Basil Kincaid (b. 1986, USA) is a post-disciplinary artist who constructs, contemplates and revises self-imposed and conditioned limitations, and explores their fixity. Through quilting, collaging, photography, installation and performance—done with found, salvaged and donated materials—Kincaid discards social mores while drafting alternative cultural fabrics. With an improvisational and community-oriented approach, resourcefulness and freedom of imagination emerge as critical components in the liberation of spirit.

Alisa Sikelianos-Carter (b. 1983, USA) is a mixed-media painter from upstate New York. Her work asserts that Black features are a manifestation of a sacred and divine technology that has served as a means of survival, both physically and metaphysically. She envisions a cosmically bountiful world that celebrates and pays homage to ancestral majesty, power, and aesthetics.

 

Inspired by traditionally Black hairstyles, Sikelianos-Carter uses web and catalogue-sourced images to construct new archetypes. Through her exploration of opulent, luminescent materials she is creating a mythology that is centered on Black resistance and utilizes the body as a sight of alchemy and divinity.