Kavi Gupta

KAVI GUPTA PRESENTS THE WRITTEN WORD, AN ONLINE EXHIBITION EXAMINING THE VISUAL VALUE OF THE VERBAL. WHAT IS THE VALUE OF A PICTURE? Just open your eyes to receive one, or close your eyes to remember one. Offer an artist a thousand words for a picture and you’ll learn what proverbs are worth. Yet, if utterances are fleeting and any story can be told with images, why would a visual artist ever need to rely on words? Each artist featured in The Written Word has its own reasons for making art you have to read in order to really see. Vito Acconci’s Name Calling Chair (1990) strives beyond beauty and utility towards a comic truth, while Glen Ligon’s Study for Negro Sunshine II, #31 reveals the anesthetizing effect of repetition on even the most confounding utterance. Roger Brown’s The Writing in the Sky revels in the circular logic of a picture undermining the power of words that establish the value of pictures; meanwhile, a single proposal from Allen Ruppersberg’s iconic Honey, I rearranged the collection series suggests language’s limitless, if sometimes senseless, potential for codification. Manish Nai’s book sculptures mobilize words as raw material for compacted objects, with the aesthetic inquiry: what is a book that cannot be read, or a sculpture that can’t fully be seen? Young-Il Ahn’s Self-Reflection I uses script to bridge antiquity and modernity, writing and then erasing traditional Hangul text until the written word communicates purely as an image. Deborah Kass deploys words to communicate brief, authoritative messages, infusing meaning into the cultural conversation, while in Patrick Chamberlain’s text paintings, words become abstract elements in formal space, same as color, shape, texture, and line. For Jeffrey Gibson, words form intertextual reminders, lifelines to memories of music, feelings, and communities bound by history, whereas in Scott Reeder’s paintings and neon sculptures, the written word is exactly what it appears to be: a conveyance of thought, unencumbered by conceptual abstraction. Or is it? Though text is essential for every work in The Written Word, their mutability proves that like the world, the word is not always what it seems.

KAVI GUPTA PRESENTS THE FIGURE IN SOLITUDE, AN ONLINE EXHIBITION EXAMINING ONENESS For years to come, tales of the forced, global solitude of 2020 will be told. Along with sagas of hardship and loneliness, there will be many who also share stories of creativity and strength. Now is the time to ask ourselves: what will we make of our time alone? Will we find ourselves in the kitchen, enchanted by culinary experimentation, like the bewitching figure in Inka Essenhigh's Kitchen 2623 C.E. (2018)? Will we don protective gear and dive into the literary classics, like the figure in Scott Reeder’s Cop Reading (2010)?, or luxuriate in the tranquility of time off, like the figure in Reeder’s Reclining Cop (2011)? Maybe solitude will bring us enlightenment, like the figure in Gerald Williams’ Illumination (1978); give us time to master our craft, like the Senufo woodcarver in Wadsworth Jarrell’s Navaga (1974); bring us the quiet confidence of Roger Brown’s Hank Williams, Honkey Tonk Man (1991); or offer us necessary space to fully observe the realities of our world, like the contemplative figure in Alfred Conteh’s Q (2020). Will solitude release our inner terror, like the figure in Manuel Mathieu’s Steven 3/20 (2015), or our inner warrior, like the soldier in Mary Sibande’s Living Memory (2011)? Or will revelation—the true meaning of apocalypse—overwhelm us, as it does the concerned figures in Conteh’s D-Chris, Clare Rojas’ Untitled (2018), and José Lerma’s Milton Friedman (2016)? Countless masterpieces have been created in solitude—in an art studio, at a writer’s desk, in a rehearsal room. When we know and love ourselves, solitude is precious: time alone to be free. Yet, even at times when we feel like strangers in our skin, what better gift than privacy to reacquaint us with our inner genius? The Figure in Solitude is a prescient reminder that the arts may not exist in isolation, but solitude absolutely, and necessarily, exist within the arts.

Kavi Gupta presents Radical Optimism, a special digital exhibition of works by artists rebelling against cynicism to imagine a joyful future for humanity. In the weeks that self-isolation and social distance have become the new normal, we hear the same phrases again and again on the news and in advertisements: “in these uncertain times,” “in these challenging times,” “in these troubling times.” We understand their meaning—that with more than a million worldwide cases, COVID-19 has presented the entire world with a uniquely harrowing ultimatum. Nonetheless, for most people, life can often be uncertain, challenging, and troubling. Before COVID-19, we were bearing witness to so many other catastrophes: the Syrian civil war, the war in Yemen, the collapse of civil society in Venezuela, and climate-related disasters such as floods in the American South and fires from Australia to California. All too often, the human condition is one of unavoidable suffering—so much so that it has become a radical gesture to promote an optimistic worldview, and to try to chart a course towards a better future for us all. Yet, there are some artists who wear the label of radical optimism like a badge of honor. Their art is a living record of their belief in the potential for love to overcome despair. Radical Optimism celebrates works by Inka Essenhigh from Uchronia, her recent series presenting a vision of a future in which humanity has resolved its conflicted relationship with the ecosphere; Jeffrey Gibson from his recent exhibition CAN YOU FEEL IT, inspired by the hopeful, welcoming, inclusive atmosphere of Chicago’s house music scene; AFRICOBRA co-founders Wadsworth Jarrell and Gerald Williams, whose historic paintings present definitive, constructive visions of Black pride; Deborah Kass, from her evocatively titled series feel good paintings for feel bad times; Mary Sibande, showing her avatar Sophie entering her purple phase, representing the end of Apartheid and the beginning of a more egalitarian future for South Africa; Michael Joo, whose silver nitrate works “render visible the invisible,” bridging humanity and nature by allowing viewers to literally see themselves within the work; and Tony Tasset, whose instantly recognizable, Pop-like forms evoke the sense of everyday aspirationalism often embedded within the American visual vernacular. Radical Optimism seizes this cultural moment to assert that although humanity has always faced uncertain, challenging, and troubling times, and this current challenge has brought us to our knees, there remain many among us who dare to imagine a better future.

Kavi Gupta presents Osmosis: in the face of the sea, an expanded and extended edition of Suchitra Mattai’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. Mattai’s expressions of transference and balance relate to the layering of new stories and cultural traditions atop those that already exist. 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. intrepid garden, the largest of the three new tapestries, is an abstracted landscape reminiscent of an untamed wilderness. Alcoves cleaved in the matting hold white sculptures aloft in the negative space, like enchanted portals into a hidden world ruled by mysterious icons. Evoking colonial-era, European pastoral figures, some of the sculptures are found objects; others were cast by Mattai; and several are made out of salt. Suchitra Mattai, intrepid garden, 2023. Vintage saris, fabric, vintage objects made of salt, cast objects made of salt, porcelain objects, vintage shelves, 120 x 168 in. “The niches are spaces of fantasy and new folklore, like portals into a past and into a future,” says Mattai. “The garden is a space for rebirth.” quicksand, a fiery red tapestry suspended between two found wooden bed posts, depicts a liquescent universe where everything is falling into the middle. The central figure is being inundated; devoured; pulled into the hole and amalgamated. This imagery speaks to Mattai’s disorienting experience of living between two cultures, as a Guyana-born woman descended from Indo-Caribbean indentured servants and now living and working as an artist in the United States. “It’s this disembodied feeling, like the ground between your feet isn’t always stable,” Mattai says. girl beast suspended in time is perhaps the most intimate of the new works, in scale and subject matter alike. Laser beams shoot from behind the veil of a shadowy figure in the center of the work. Crouched as if in hiding, or maybe about to pounce, this seemingly mystical creature first appeared in Mattai’s girl beast (2022) as an embroidered interloper bounding through a vintage European needlepoint. A stand-in for the “other,” the excluded, or the people who do not fit in, the girl beast’s laser sight is her special power—the acute perspective of someone observing from the margins. Suchitra Mattai, Osmosis, 2022. Salt, fabric, cords, wood, dimensions variable. As in the original manifestation of the exhibition, the central work in Osmosis: in the face of the sea is a large-scale sculpture of a temple ruin made from salt. The form appears to be emerging from the floor. Its glistening, encrusted form recalls a story of seafarers off the coast of ​​Mahabalipuram who witnessed the appearance of such ruins when the waters temporarily receded from shore prior to a tsunami. When the sea rushed back in, the ruins disappeared. They exist now only in the seafarers’ memories and the stories they tell. Recalling the architecture of a Hindu temple, the temple ruin is positioned in the part of the gallery where the garbha griha, or most sacred space, would be. “Osmosis relates in a way to the flexibility of storytelling,” Mattai says. “As the exhibition evolves, it uses the story of the fishermen as a starting point, but there’s no ending point. It’s about agency, pushing and pulling, ebbing and flowing, and the curiosity of probing what’s revealed, and unearthing what’s concealed.” 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.

Kavi Gupta presents I Feel Everything, an exhibition of new sculptural paintings by Trinidadian- American artist Allana Clarke made from Salon Pro 30 Sec. Super Hair Bond Glue, a material that has become signature to her practice. Clarke’s first solo exhibition to focus exclusively on this series of works, I Feel Everything is an aesthetic treatise on the poetics of black space—and Black space. “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. 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. Though not implicitly negative, hair extensions become self-defeating when they’re socially encouraged as a way of attaining closer proximity to ideas of whiteness—for example, when rules or laws legislate against natural Black hair styles. When you cannot access social mobility unless you participate in a system that denigrates what is inherent to your being, you exchange something of your essence for the hope of simply moving through the world with a bit more ease. Clarke pioneered her performative sculptural method in order to create a tangible history of someone grappling with and moving through systems meant to denigrate conceptions of Blackness. “What is important for me in the process of rearticulating this material is that it has become free—a completely new context has been created for it,” Clarke says. “This work is about freedom.” Two types of works are presented in the exhibition: draped, undulating pieces made with fluid, organic gestures; and flatter pieces created with more restrictive, reiterative patterns of movement. The more undulating works entice the mind into hidden zones of blackness within blackness lurking beneath petrified folds, covered up, mysterious to all but their maker. The flatter works are more about being present with what can be seen within rhythmic interplays of shine and shadow. A visceral residue of corporeal feeling is perceptible in all of the work. “My performance actions are embedded in the material and cured upon its surface,” Clarke says. “The longer you spend time with its blackness, the longer you rest with it, the longer you are in proximity to it, you begin the process of grasping its reality.” Reliant upon time for their making, and formulated from a distinctly recognizable product of our time, Clarke’s hair bonding glue sculptures nonetheless possess a timeless aspect. As concrete objects, they palpably harken to the primordial beginnings of everything. As abstract markers of freedom, they feel more like images of faith. “Black space requires patience,” says Clarke. “You have to truly pay attention to it to be able to receive its complexity, for it to reveal itself. This is a type of meditative space.” Forthcoming, Allana Clarke: I Feel Everything, KAVI GUPTA | ELIZABETH ST. FL. 1 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. SHARE DOWNLOAD PRESS RELEASE WORKS Allana Clarke What was Lost, 2023 Salon Pro 30 Sec. Super Hair Bond Glue 84 x 65 x 4 in 213.4 x 165.1 x 10.2 cm ALLANA CLARKE What was Lost, 2023 Salon Pro 30 Sec. Super Hair Bond Glue 84 x 65 x 4 in 213.4 x 165.1 x 10.2 cm Allana Clarke I Feel Everything, 2023 Salon Pro 30 Sec. Super Hair Bond Glue 65 x 72 x 4 in 165.1 x 182.9 x 10.2 cm ALLANA CLARKE I Feel Everything, 2023 Salon Pro 30 Sec. Super Hair Bond Glue 65 x 72 x 4 in 165.1 x 182.9 x 10.2 cm Allana Clarke Noone, 2023 Salon Pro 30 Sec. Super Hair Bond Glue 77 x 70 x 4 in 195.6 x 177.8 x 10.2 cm ALLANA CLARKE Noone, 2023 Salon Pro 30 Sec. Super Hair Bond Glue 77 x 70 x 4 in 195.6 x 177.8 x 10.2 cm Allana Clarke Revenant , 2023 Salon Pro 30 Sec. Super Hair Bond Glue 32 x 32 x 2 in 81.3 x 81.3 x 5.1 cm ALLANA CLARKE Revenant , 2023 Salon Pro 30 Sec. Super Hair Bond Glue 32 x 32 x 2 in 81.3 x 81.3 x 5.1 cm INSTALLATION VIEWS 082 Install High Res 086 Install High Res 084 Install High Res 085 Install High Res 081 Install High Res 083 Install High Res 087 Install High Res 090 Install High Res 092 Install High Res 091 Install High Res 089 Install High Res 088 Install High Res VIDEO VIDEOS Allana Clarke, I Feel Everything ALLANA CLARKE, I FEEL EVERYTHING KAVI GUPTA | WASHINGTON BLVD | FL. 1 Allana Clarke’s series of performative, wall-mounted sculptures made from Salon Pro 30 Sec. Super Hair Bond Glue, a material that has become signature to her practice. The voids in this... READ MORE PRESS Esmaa Mohamoud, A Seat Above the Table (Warren Moon), 2019, found rattan peacock chair, rattan, paint, tape, plastic, adhesive, nails, 290 × 66 × 66 cm. Courtesy of the artist. KAVI GUPTA: THE BEST SHOWS TO SEE IN CHICAGO RIGHT NOW LISA YIN ZHANG, FRIEZE, APRIL 13, 2023 EVENTS EXPO Chicago 2023 EXPO CHICAGO 2023 13 - 16 APR 2023 Opening Reception: Allana Clarke, I Feel Everything OPENING RECEPTION: ALLANA CLARKE, I FEEL EVERYTHING KAVI GUPTA | WASHINGTON BLVD. FL. 1 14 APR 2023 Allana Clarke, Chanel Lacy and Kendra Walker: Mimosa Brunch + Conversation w/ The Black Art Experience ALLANA CLARKE, CHANEL LACY AND KENDRA WALKER: MIMOSA BRUNCH + CONVERSATION W/ THE BLACK ART EXPERIENCE 835 W. WASHINGTON BLVD. CHICAGO. FL 1. 15 APR 2023

Kavi Gupta presents Let Them Consume Me In The Light, a solo exhibition of new works by internationally acclaimed conceptual artist Esmaa Mohamoud. The exhibition 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 nonBlack people alike. 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.” 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 utilitarian functionality of Mohamoud’s uncanny creations has been obliterated, leaving only their artifice to behold. Like monuments to nostalgia lining a road to nirvana, they make longing and nothingness seem eerily the same. A Seat Above the Table (Angela Bassett), Mohamoud’s 12-foot-tall rattan peacock chair, is named in honor of an actress who towers over her contemporaries, deserving not only a seat at the table but a seat high above it. Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton was famously photographed sitting in such a chair during the height of the 1960s Civil Rights Era, transforming it from an ordinary piece of furniture into an icon of pride and power. With its seat raised absurdly beyond the reach of a sitter, Mohamoud’s peacock chair takes on a double meaning that infers the hollowness that often underlies symbols. Its rattan bars project penitent shadows on the walls—a reminder that the original peacock chairs were woven by prisoners in colonial Asia (particularly the Philippines) and then sold to visiting dignitaries, with the revenue channeled back into the prisons. Mohamoud’s colossal pink Cadillac sculpture, titled Nirvana (Oh, Sweet Elham), perches on steel rims so massive that viewers can walk under its glossy chassis. From there, they can see that the guts of the car have been removed, rendering it useless as a conveyance. The work was initially inspired by a miniature black Cadillac VHS tape rewinder once owned by Mohamoud’s grandmother Elham. Examining her childhood memories of watching movies with her grandmother and rewinding them in that little car prompted Mohamoud to research how Cadillacs became an iconic part of Black culture. She learned how Black people were systematically barred from purchasing luxury automobiles in the early 20th century. Threatened by slumping sales as wealthy White people lost their fortunes in the Great Depression, Cadillac broke the trend, becoming the first luxury car brand in America to directly market and sell to Black consumers. Mohamoud underscores the literal emptiness of Nirvana (Oh, Sweet Elham) with symbolic custom additions. Hidden speakers broadcasting ghostly melodies through the void; an American flag vanity license plate bearing the slogan In God We Trust; and a dazzling but inoperative chrome steering wheel become tokens of the strange currencies of visibility, status, and shine. Like the peacock chair and Cadillac they surround, Mohamoud’s black steel dandelions are notable for both their beauty and their artificiality. Part of a larger installation project called Faith in the Seeds, the dandelions memorialize Black people killed by police violence. Dandelions are hardy wildflowers that can survive in even the harshest conditions, and are known to be among the most nutritious plants on the planet. Nonetheless, they became classified as weeds in the majority White suburbs of North America, where pristine green lawns signal a homeowner’s assiduousness and dominion over nature. In the gallery, Mohamoud’s dandelions are bathed in a soft, yellow-orange light, like a peaceful sunset. Pillows are offered to visitors who wish to sit among the dandelions. Mohamoud calls it a “melanin charging station,” a space of peace and lightness to just exist in and absorb energy before having to go back out into a world filled with racism and hate. “The eradication of Black bodies by the American police is analogous with dandelions,” Mohamoud says. “Dandelions are beautiful, but people hate this flower. We have conditioned ourselves for this response. I couldn’t unsee the comparison between the resilience of dandelions and the resilience of the Black community. The African diaspora, it spreads its seeds in the wind.” Titled Gluttony, Gluttony, Gluttony, Mohamoud’s shea butter triptych mobilizes a material prized as a moisturizer to shine light on the exploitation of child labor in Africa. Before carving it, Mohamoud dries her ethically sourced shea butter until it takes on an ivory color. No longer useful as a beauty product, the material is carved into the haunting reflections of the young African girls who harvest shea nuts in Africa. Sitting atop Italian marble plinths, the three busts are surrounded by 15,000 sculpted shea butter nuts, cast from real Ghanaian shea nuts. Ghana produces around 130,000 tons of shea butter per year. While the international companies that export the material make exorbitant profits, the women who harvest and process shea nuts are ruthlessly exploited, working long hours, largely during the rainy season, and typically earning the equivalent of about two dollars after a five-day work week. “It’s this system of North American consumption without regard for the environment or for the young girls who are doing the labor,” Mohamoud says. “Feels like gluttony to me.” Replacing monolithic depictions of Black culture with more layered representations, Let Them Consume Me In The Light elucidates the complexity of the narratives shaping contemporary Black body politics. Mohamoud creates space in which to reconsider our nostalgia for misremembered, and often misrepresented histories, and invites us into a more open and multitudinous relationship with Blackness than we have had in the past. 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.

Kavi Gupta presents Roger Brown, Palace of Wonders, an exhibition celebrating Roger Brown’s late-career series of paintings based on the visual language of circus sideshow banners. Brown was an avid student of American visual culture. He trained and taught in arguably the best art school of his time, but also sought knowledge from self-taught artists, craftspeople, cartoonists, and the aesthetic strategies of advertising and pop culture. His range of influences suggests he had a universal artistic consciousness that acknowledged no concrete separation between the so-called genres of fine art and outsider art. In 1990, when he was already an established artist, Brown attended Palace of Wonders: Sideshow Banners of the Circus and Carnival at the Krannert Art Museum in Champaign, Illinois, an exhibition of historic sideshow banners curated by circus artists Glen C. Davis and Randy Johnson. It was one of the first serious museum examinations of the art form since sideshows came into existence in the late 18th century, when traveling circuses themselves first appeared in America. No official relationship existed between early circuses and sideshow promoters, who were mainly hustlers looking to cash in on the circus crowds. Unlike the athletic, choreographed spectacles and trained animals featured in the main circus tents, sideshows included a mix of unusual creatures; performers defying death by swallowing swords, walking across fire, and climbing ladders made of knives; and “freaks of nature” who were purported to have, for example, the head of a human but the body of a spider or a snake. As more circus owners formed official relationships with the increasingly popular sideshows, a vivid artistic tradition took shape. Blending rough “freak show” imagery with the glamor and flash of the big top, the aesthetic grew to include bombastic visuals, bright colors, and sizzling language designed to entice people into the shows. The Palace of Wonders exhibition at the Krannert Art Museum left an indelible impact on Brown’s artistic practice. He produced at least a dozen sideshow paintings that same year, and continued revisiting the format for years to come. Brown’s paintings not only paid homage to the visual language of the sideshow banners; they embraced the tangled relationship between the so-called main events and “outside attractions.” All of Brown’s interests are on display in his sideshow paintings, including artworld satire, political controversy, current news, queer culture, American history, nature’s fury, architecture, and bad drivers. Invoking the sideshow ethos, Brown brought into focus the topics he saw as being outside the spotlight, or beyond polite conversation: lurid scandals, ugly controversies, lowbrow entertainment, and the opaque art world. Museum of What’s Happening Now shows Brown’s trivializing opinion of Abstract Expressionism, a powerful influence in the art market of his time. In one fell swoop the work satirizes artists who blindly follow trends, collectors who artificially puff up the value of popular art, and institutions that glorify whatever happens to be at the top of the art world pyramid scheme at the moment. Similar satires of supposedly separate interests that are actually in cahoots, and sideshows that are actually main attractions, underlie several of Brown’s sideshow banner paintings, including Government Smokescreen, which targets the savings and loan scandals of the 1990s; And Everybody Listens, a commentary on the fatwa that was placed on the author Salman Rushdie after he published his book Satanic Verses; and Aha! Heterosexuals Fuck Too, which addresses hypocritical political and social attitudes surrounding the AIDS pandemic. Some of Brown’s other sideshow banner paintings draw on more personal content, such as Kissin’ Cousins, which traces Browns true-life ancestral connection to Elvis Presley, and Hank Williams, Honky Tonk Man, which reads like a frank tribute to the country music star, who grew up in Georgiana, Alabama, just downstate from Roger Brown’s home town of Hamilton. These paintings again seem to ask what the main attractions are: the famous singers, or the artist who immortalizes their images after they’re gone? Equal parts sincere and sardonic, Brown’s exploration of sideshow banners feels less like a singular thesis about the “freak show” of modern living and more like an intimate snapshot of his own creative interests. Titled in honor of the presentation that inspired him, Roger Brown, Palace of Wonders is a dedicated exploration of this unique body of work within the artist’s late career.

Kavi Gupta presents It Is What It Is, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Alfred Conteh. Following the recent inclusion of Conteh’s work in the traveling Smithsonian Institution exhibition Men of Change: Power. Triumph. Truth., and in The Legacy Museum’s inaugural exhibition at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, AL, It Is What It Is extends the evolution of Conteh’s acclaimed portraiture series, Two Fronts. The work elucidates Conteh’s statement that Black Americans are fighting battles on two separate fronts—one from the outside, and one from within. Conteh paints portraits of people he meets in and around Atlanta, Georgia, where he lives and works. He gets to know the people he paints; he learns about their personal histories, asks about their aspirations and the challenges they’ve faced. His portraits capture their outward countenance—their body, posture, and fashion—wIth photorealistic perfection, while his acrylic paints 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. “When you see my work, you see cracked surfaces, weathered paint, things left to ruin,” Conteh says. “When I paint these things, that’s the reality of a people. That’s the type of story I’m telling in this work, through the materials. The only beauty that I see in it is that folks are still here despite those circumstances.” The title It Is What It Is is based on a parable about a pair of magic glasses, told by civil rights activist and comedian Dick Gregory. In the story, the universe offers certain people a chance to wear magic glasses that will show them the world the way it is, not as people say it’s supposed to be. If they put the glasses on, there are rules—they can never take the glasses off, and they can’t force anybody else to wear the glasses. The story conveys Conteh's experience as a Black American artist trying to paint what Black American life actually is, particularly in the American South.

Kavi Gupta presents Osmosis, a solo exhibition of new multi-media works by Indo-Caribbean American artist Suchitra Mattai. Thinking about the saltwater ocean migrations that have shaped her family’s cultural and geographic heritage, Mattai has both a scientific and a poetic interest in the process of osmosis, which involves the migration of water molecules from one region to another. Salt is a trigger for the osmotic process, which, in a manner of speaking, is about the emergence of something and the loss of something. To create the works in Osmosis Mattai employed salt as both a sculptural medium and a chemical instigator of aesthetic transformation. The material empowers Mattai’s aesthetic expressions of emergence and loss as they relate to the layering of new stories and cultural traditions atop those that already exist. Anchoring the exhibition is a large-scale salt sculpture depicting a tilted temple ruin, seemingly emerging from underground. The glistening, encrusted form recalls the story of seafarers off the coast of ​​Mahabalipuram who witnessed the appearance of such ruins when the waters temporarily receded from shore prior to a tsunami. When the sea rushed back in, the ruins disappeared. They exist now only in the seafarers’ memories, and in folklore. The exhibition is designed to move the viewer through the architecture of a Hindu temple, culminating in the garbha griha, or most sacred space, where the large sculpture resides. The temple’s architecture reflects the space of memory. Mattai’s personal, familial, and cultural history has similarly been revealed, erased, altered, and in some ways constructed by the sea. Her artworks critically, and often joyfully, reflect upon this complex past by incorporating significant family heirlooms such as her mother’s vintage saris and her grandmother’s prayer Dupatta. Simultaneously, the works push her family’s story forward by incorporating materials of personal significance to Mattai’s American experience, such as feather boas, shattered glass from her broken studio window, and found objects recovered from second hand stores. “Osmosis relates in a way to the flexibility of storytelling,” says Mattai. “It’s about agency, pushing and pulling, ebbing and flowing, and the curiosity of probing what’s revealed, and unearthing what’s concealed.”

Kavi Gupta presents Black Stars & White Paintings, the highly anticipated solo exhibition of new paintings by New York-based abstract artist James Little, a critically and publicly celebrated highlight of the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Quiet as It's Kept. In her recent longform profile on Little in The New York Times, Hilarie M. Sheets described Little as “one of the breakout stars” of the Biennial, describing how his paintings “held court with a mysterious luminosity and presence. The phenomenal impact Little’s work had on Biennial visitors marks just one more milestone in a tremendous year, which also includes the stunning, retrospective tribute James Little: Homecoming at The Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Little’s hometown of Memphis, TN, and the inclusion of Little’s work in the era-defining traveling exhibition The Dirty South. Black Stars & White Paintings builds on the momentum of Little’s landmark year, marking a moment of long overdue, global recognition of his status as a contemporary master. Little’s erudite Black Stars captivate the eye with their velvety luster, dramatic, acuminate forms, and restrained palette of only two shades of black. Their elegant simplicity belies the months of exacting effort Little invests building up their luxuriant surfaces with dozens of layers of handmade encaustic paints—a medium he painstakingly manufactures himself in his Brooklyn studio. Reflective of Little’s lifelong study of color relationships and formal aesthetic theories, these guileless masterworks demand veneration as monuments to pure abstraction. Yet, as their carefully crafted name reveals, they simultaneously proclaim Little’s grasp of this historical moment, and his awareness of how identity politics has often skewed people’s perspective on his work.

Kavi Gupta presents Kumoji (Cloud Path / A Road Traversed By Birds And The Moon), a solo exhibition of new paintings by Miya Ando. Expressive of the transitory and immaterial quality of clouds at night, the exhibition spotlights nature’s impermanence and interdependence, concepts also prevalent in Ando’s recent solo exhibitions at the Noguchi Museum, Queens, NY; Katzen Arts Center, Washington DC; and Asia Society Texas Center, Houston, TX; and her recent group exhibitions at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (with Marina Abramović, Marilyn Minter, Ólafur Eliasson, and Ai Weiwei); Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Ando lived her formative years between a Buddhist temple in Japan and the mountains of Northern California. The unique vantage point expressed in Kumoji (Cloud Path / A Road Traversed By Birds And The Moon) reflects her experiences as an artist occupying the margins between Japanese and Western culture. Ando’s circular night cloud paintings read like memories—never static, fluctuating endlessly depending on the position of the viewer and the available light. Based on actual night clouds Ando photographed in a variety of locations over the past three years, their ephemeral qualities illustrate the sentiment behind the Japanese phrase “mono no aware,” roughly translated as “the pathos of things.” Beauty fades; strength dissolves into frailty. Everything follows this rule; it is the vernacular of nature. “Something becomes more beautiful and sublime the more impermanent it is,” Ando says. “There’s a psychological shift that occurs when one recognizes the pathos of falling cherry blossoms, or the moon going through phases, or a passing cloud.”

Kavi Gupta presents The Best Part About Us, a solo exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by internationally acclaimed, Japanese-born, New York-based artist Tomokazu Matsuyama. The exhibition comes on the heels of the artist’s landmark solo exhibitions at two of China’s largest and most influential private museums, Long Museum Shanghai and Long Museum Chongqing. As with those exhibitions, the visual language Matsuyama deploys in the works in The Best Part About Us reflects the experiences of today’s nomadic diaspora—a global, intercultural community of wandering people who seek to understand their place in a world full of contrasting visual and cultural dialects. Amalgamated from his vast mental and physical archive of iconographical material, Matsuyama’s painted worlds vivify his lived experience. His fresh approach to the language of figuration creates dual references to both our contemporary realities and our multiplicitous pasts, combining allusions to fashion models torn from the pages of glossy magazines; flora and fauna borrowed from Edo-period folding screens; open-source wallpaper patterns from the Internet; fragmented snippets of pop culture and celebrity life; frozen movements captured from the garments of centuries-old Buddhist sculptures; compositional strategies of the European Renaissance masters; aesthetic cues from Modernist art history such as shaped canvases and Abstract Expressionist techniques; and of course, those innumerable bits of branded trash ubiquitous on the streets of every city in the Western world. Matsuyama’s carefully constructed, fictional landscapes welcome anyone inside to build their own narrative and discover their own meaning. What name should we give this aesthetic, which relates to nobody nowhere, yet is recognized by everyone everywhere? “I call it the global us,” Matsuyama says. This is Matsuyama’s mastery as an artist; by questioning what is familiar and what is foreign, he shows us pictures of others that are also reflections of ourselves. The uncanny process of recognizing the unfamiliar also plays out in the presence of Matsuyama’s sculptures, several of which are included in the exhibition. Simultaneously familiar and alien, they hint exquisitely at the worlds we know, not from life but from a dream. Hand welded from sheets of stainless steel and hand buffed to a mirror shine, these fragmented, labyrinthine forms are frozen in gestures that, again, relate to the “global us.” “My visual language is a community-based language,” Matsuyama says. “My paintings are not intended to inform viewers of specific messages nor narratives. These little fractions of everyday culture remind the viewers of narratives in their own life. That leads to ownership. It represents them. It represents me. It represents us. What’s the best part? It’s subjective.” Matsuyama received his MFA in Communications Design from the Pratt Institute, New York. Recent exhibitions include Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; Tomokazu Matsuyama: Accountable Nature, Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai, China, and Long Museum Chongqing; Tomokazu Matsuyama: Palimpsest, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA; Thousand Regards, Katzen Arts Center at American University Museum, Washington, DC, USA; Tomokazu Matsuyama: Oh Magic Night, Hong Kong Contemporary Art (HOCA) Foundation, Repulse Bay, Hong Kong; Tomokazu Matsuyama: No Place Like Home, Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery, Luxembourg; Made in 17 Hours, Museum of Contemporary Art Museum, Sydney, Australia; and Edo Pop: The Graphic Impact of Japanese Prints, Japan Society, New York, NY, USA, among others. Large-scale public displays of Matsuyama's work can be found all over the world, including a monumental, permanent sculptural installation activating Shinjuku Station East Square, Tokyo, Japan; a sculptural installation at the heart of Ivy Station, a transformative, mixed-use development project in Culver City, CA; a 30m painted mural and two large-scale stainless steel sculptures in Tipstar Dome Chiba, a cutting edge, state-of-the-art cycling arena in Chiba, Japan; Magic City, a 124m x 150m LED billboard animating the facades of neighboring skyscrapers on the riverfront of downtown Chongqing, China; a large-scale, outdoor steel sculpture on the grounds of Meiji Shrine in Tokyo; as well as Thousand Regards/Shape of Color, a monumental mural commissioned by the City of Beverly Hills, CA. Matsuyama’s works are in the permanent collections of the Long Museum, Shanghai, China; Powerlong Art Museum, Shanghai, China; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA, USA; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA, USA; the Royal Family of Dubai; Dean Collection (Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys), USA; Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, CA, USA; Pt. Leo Estate Sculpture Park, Melbourne, Australia; and the institutional collections of Microsoft, Toyota Automobile, Bank of Sharjah, NIKE Japan, and Levi’s Strauss and Co. Japan.

Kavi Gupta proudly presents Specific Shapes, a solo exhibition of new works by Jessica Stockholder, acclaimed visual artist, elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Guggenheim Fellow, Anonymous Was A Woman grantee, and recipient of the Lucelia Artist Award from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The exhibition takes its name from Stockholder’s latest body of work—the series Specific Shape / Fixed Object—which is introduced here alongside a selection of new works from three other ongoing series: AB Photos with EWaste; Assists; and Text / Poetry. Stockholder’s Specific Shapes are fundamentally abstract, painted by hand on the wall, and variable in scale from one installation to another. Their contours are derived from a process of looking at spaces between objects, bodies, and shadows in the visual environment to better understand the relationships among them, and to disturb the habit of seeing clear boundaries where perhaps there are none. Stockholder synthesizes these impressions into re-imagined Franken-shapes, given new life through the electricity of coalescence. Each Specific Shape is united with a color and paired with a companion Fixed Object made with a collection of materials gathered from many realms of life. The Fixed Object is concrete and unchanged as the piece moves from one locale to another. Comprehending the juncture between the abstract and concrete in this particular body of work, and in most of Stockholder’s work, requires that humans travel to the works’ specific location and regard the works in communion with their own bodies, in real time and space. As with her AB Photos with EWaste—which propose relationships between objects on the floor and images hanging on the wall—these Specific Shapes at once seem lovingly connected to and brutally colonized by their Fixed Objects. As with Stockholder’s Assists series—in which sculptures can also function as supports for other works—and her Text / Poetry series—in which motifs co-evolve between images and words—the Specific Shape / Fixed Object series seems perfectly conceived to undermine assumptions about systems of connection and reliance. As Stockholder puts it, “This work is about relationships and the limits of control.” Stockholder is renowned for consistently reinvigorating the art field by subverting its tropes, such as the notion that abstraction is apolitical. Her work is created in response to, and incorporates, the contemporary flood of consumer products made with industrial materials and processes; it inhabits and confronts a world where those who make and consume such objects are also hyper-aware of the threat they pose to human existence. Stockholder leverages the ways our use of technology has altered our relationship with the surfaces of our devices, which disguise their internal mechanisms. Incorporating these concepts and objects into her compositions, she allows for myriad meanings and references to accumulate, resulting in works that remind us how important form is to all areas of life and that it has political resonance. A particularly democratic characteristic of Stockholder’s Specific Shape / Fixed Object series is that she provides straightforward instructions so that anyone could theoretically recreate one of the works, à la Sol LeWitt. Unlike a LeWitt wall drawing, however, individuals installing these works have significant leeway for experimentation, for example, by modifying the scale of the shape, or the precise position of the companion object, or perhaps the angle at which the projector is pointed when tracing the shape. The entitlement this bestows upon non-artists, such as curators, collectors, and art installers, jibes perfectly with Stockholder’s unique ability to make compositions that declare the peculiarity of art objects, while simultaneously suggesting that, as instigators of poetic experiences, art objects and other objects are not really so different. Many a time while walking the dog with my partner, one of us, having suddenly perceived some passing, sanguine relationship between, say, the yellow circle on a stoplight, the silver edge of a passing bus, and a white chemtrail from a jet, has pointed to this confluence of shapes, colors, forms, and light, and said to the other, “Look at that Jessica Stockholder.” The delectable, punk-rock mish-mashery of everyday ephemera Stockholder mobilizes throughout this exhibition includes such wide-ranging stuff as electronic waste, tree branches, metal hardware, bungee cords, broken dishes, furniture, yarn, and paint. In this manifestation, the works hold court inside gallery walls, but like everything Stockholder makes, it might manifest wherever a world exists to support it in its intent—which, simply, is to make us stop, look, and think for ourselves about what we see.

Kavi Gupta proudly presents Abstraction and Social Critique, an intergenerational group show of artists whose aesthetic positions declare the continued relevance and influence of abstraction. The artist James Little, whose masterful geometric paintings are included in the exhibition, offers this personal elucidation of why he chose to pursue abstraction in his work: “Abstraction frees me to do whatever I want.” Artist Clare Rojas echoes that sentiment when asked what she is talking about when she talks about abstract art. “My main concern is creating my own sacred construct, one I have freedom to alter,” she says. “It’s about feeling that freedom and empowerment.” Mimesis oppresses the artist by relegating where to begin or where to end, while abstraction serves the changing and unpredictable needs of the individual creative being. It could be argued that abstract art is thus inherently political, because it is an expression of personal freedom. It could also be said that abstraction is inherently anarchic, because it invites every point of view. Yet, every point of view has not always been welcomed into the conversation about what abstraction is, and what it means to contemporary culture. Voices of BIPOC artists and artists identifying as women or LGBTQ+ have been systematically quieted through their exclusion from nearly every level of the contemporary art field, particularly in the United States. Many academies and institutions have long served and upheld cultural canons that lean heavily cisgendered, straight, and white, marginalizing all other artists. Relegated to the sidelines, showing their work in galleries that are mostly ignored by the art press, these artists have largely been left out of mainstream critical conversations, rendering their efforts and achievements all but invisible to those who write, edit, and study the art historical record. Kavi Gupta’s mission is to amplify the voices of diverse and underrepresented artists to expand the canon of art history. Though their approaches are varied and idiosyncratic, the artists spotlighted in Abstraction and Social Critique are connected in the sense that their practices allow for a fully actualized conception of abstraction. Some works, like those of Angel Otero, Abigail DeVille, and Richard Hunt, convey social critique through their methods and materials. Others, like those of Raymond Saunders, Cameron Welch, Miya Ando, Modou Dieng, Jamaal Peterman, and Rewind Collective, introduce personal and social narratives, though in abstracted terms. Paintings by Jack Whitten, James Little, Al Loving, Brooklin Soumahoro, and Clare Rojas can be read in purely formal terms—the combination of the artist’s lived experience and their intentions infuses the works with political relevance. Within the exhibition, we see artists engaged in an effort to subvert systems of aesthetic oppression and control that attempt to define and thus limit what abstract art is and can be. Their presence here testifies to the changing needs of the contemporary art field, and broadens participation in the ongoing debate about the scope and influence of abstract art.

Kavi Gupta presents Surface is Only a Material Vehicle for Spirit, a group exhibition spotlighting the work of eight dynamic voices within the field of contemporary abstraction, guest curated by artist Kennedy Yanko. Is there a metaphysical side to materiality? Sculptor Kennedy Yanko’s curatorial debut with Kavi Gupta explores the complex perceptual relationships that exist between the surface realities of aesthetic phe-nomena, and the illusions and transcendental insights experienced by artists and viewers of the work. “What is the disconnect between our innate knowing-ness and our optic interpretations of the world around us?” Yanko asks. “I am presented with something seemingly concrete in front of me only to find it is soft and supple. What happens inside me as my brain tries to understand and recalibrate itself? That dissonance is the conduit to a greater understanding—the disrup-tion to our seeming truth that evokes consciousness.” Inspired by the writings of abstract artist Jack Whitten (1939 — 2018), the title of this exhibition spotlights the complications that arise when when we try distinguish-ing what is superficial from the truths that lie beyond first impressions. Whitten considered his paintings to be structured manifestations of his feelings—maps of his soul. While each artist in this exhibition mobilizes a unique visual strategy in their work, each also offers a distinctively personal elucidation of Whitten’s belief that artists are experts at using material realities to convey the unseen depths of spirit. Surface is Only a Material Vehicle for Spirit features a new, site-specific installation by Katie Bell and works by Pamela Council, Alexandre Diop, Gracelee Lawrence, Charles Mason III, Monica Rezman, Jessica Stoller, and Chiffon Thomas.

Kavi Gupta presents Wadsworth Jarrell and Gerald Williams: Works on Paper, the first exhibition to center the quieter, more speculative works on paper that helped define the distinctive visual languages of these two crucial founders of AFRICOBRA. Since their recent inclusion in such internationally acclaimed exhibitions as Soul of a Nation, AFRICOBRA 50, and AFRICOBRA: Nation Time, an official collateral exhibition of the 2019 Venice Biennale, Jarrell and Williams are known mostly for their painterly works on canvas and panel. Featuring a broad selection of drawings, prints, and paintings on paper, some never before exhibited, Works on Paper spotlights a cross-section of formal and technical innovations that the artists worked through over the decades and which came to define their individual positions. This rarely seen side of the two artists offers insights into the roots of their historic paintings, and expands upon the story of their transformation from artistic revolutionaries into contemporary legends.

Kavi Gupta presents Realms of Refuge, a group show of new works by Dominic Chambers, Allana Clarke, Basil Kincaid, Tomokazu Matsuyama, Michi Meko, Devan Shimoyama, and Alisa Sikelianos-Carter. Culture begins within the inner wilderness of the artist’s thoughts and feelings. Rest and stillness are essential to the creative act. Realms of Refuge can be literal or symbolic zones—anywhere the intellect is nurtured, instinct is unhindered, and the soul is free to wander. Focusing inward in both a physical and symbolic sense, the artists in this exhibition create works that are rooted in introspection and metamorphosis. They speak of the desire to retreat from the oppressive gaze, towards a safe space for creativity and renewal.

Unhand Me, Demon! brings together for the first time in the United States 13 years of work by renowned South African artist Mary Sibande. Inaugurating Kavi Gupta’s new street-level space at 835 W. Washington Blvd. in Chicago, the exhibition examines a crucial question of our time: How do we shed negative energies and move forward when we find ourselves at a crossroads in life? The impetus for the name of the show, Sibande says, was the legend of blues singer Robert Johnson, who allegedly mysteriously transformed in a matter of weeks from someone with almost no ability into one of the greatest blues guitarists of all time. People claimed Johnson made a deal with the Devil, selling his soul for talent at the crossroads of Highways 49 and 61 in Mississippi. Modern research reveals the true source of Johnson’s transformation was hard work under the tutelage of blues guitarist Isaiah "Ike" Zimmerman, who gave Johnson lessons in a cemetery late at night, where they would not be bothered. “Crossroads are about cutting away the old life for something new,” says Sibande. “The demon for me, if I were to translate it from my home language, would be bad energies, or a thing that’s holding you, or pulling you back. This show is about letting go, a preparation for going forward. As an individual, one has to shed some things like a snake.” Like the Robert Johnson story, Sibande’s oeuvre is rooted in a space where intelligent effort intersects with, and is sometimes confused with, magical thinking. The work centers a character named Sophie, whom Sibande describes as her alter ego or avatar. Sophie’s mythology is an autobiographical representation of chapters in Sibande’s life, as she witnesses and participates in the evolving social, political, and cultural roles of Black women in the aftermath of Apartheid in South Africa. Placing Sophie within different narratives and contexts, coded through color, Sibande mobilizes photography, sculpture, and installation to explore issues of domestic labor (the Blue Phase), protest and revolution (the Purple Phase), and, in her latest body of work, issues of blood, anger, and empowerment (the Red Phase). They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To (2008) finds Sophie dressed in the traditional blue and white outfit of a South African domestic worker, adorned on the front with the logo of Superman. Admiration of the Purple Figure (2013) and A Terrible Beauty is Born (2013) show Sophie dressed elegantly in a flowing purple dress, surrounded by throngs of embryo-like purple creatures—a reference to the Purple Rain Protests in South Africa, and the subsequent birthing of a new generation of civil rights activists. Right Now! (2015), Ascension of the Purple Figure (2016), and Wielding the Collision of the Past, Present, and Future (2017) bear witness as Sophie moves from protest into empowerment; while The Domba Dance (2019) shows Sophie arriving fully in the Red Phase, unleashing dogs of war. Sophie’s most recent transformation is further expressed in two images titled To everything there is a season (2019) and Turn, turn, turn, turn (2019), which attest to a spiritual cleansing. Together, the works in Unhand Me, Demon! offer a broad overview of the evolution of Sibande’s studio practice up to this point. The show also lays the groundwork for what Sibande says will be the next crossroads, as her avatar Sophie moves into the Green Phase, suggestive of rebirth. “It’s time to hit the restart button,” Sibande says. Accompanying the exhibition, Kavi Gupta is proud to premiere a new short-form documentary filmed on location in Johannesburg, further elucidating Sibande’s studio practice, methods, and concepts. Based in Johannesburg, Sibande has taken part in the 2011 Venice Biennale as the representative of South Africa; Lyon Biennial; Dakar Biennial; and Havana Biennial, among others. She has exhibited internationally in leading museums, including the Met Breuer, New York, USA; British Museum, London, UK; Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa; JAG (Johannesburg Art Gallery), Johannesburg, South Africa; Boston Museum of Fine Art, Boston, USA; Musée d’art Contemporain de Lyon, France; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa; Museum of Contemporary Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Kiasma Museum for Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; Museum Beelden aan Zee, Hague, Netherlands; and Somerset House, London, UK, among others. Sibande’s works are included in prominent collections internationally, such as the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC, USA; Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, USA; Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, USA; UMMA (University of Michigan Museum of Art), Ann Arbor, USA; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, USA; Zeitz MOCCA, Cape Town, South Africa; Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne, France; and Iziko South African Museums, Cape Town, South Africa. Forthcoming exhibitions include Mary Sibande: Blue Red Purple at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, USA, and her work is currently on view at Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA in Bordeaux, France.

Kavi Gupta presents Negroland: A Landscape of Desires, a solo exhibition of new paintings and ceramics by Haitian-born, Montreal-based artist Manuel Mathieu. Mathieu’s practice is guided by intuition and the unknown as much as by intellect and memory. He sees the artist’s studio as crucible—a container in which forces and pressures are exerted to transform materials and ideas. The work is not the end of the process; rather, it creates the circumstances for connections, perspectives, and relationships to come into being. His latest abstract paintings and ceramic sculptures mobilize materiality and form as a means to embrace, and express, the messiness of desire. The works feel both intimate and universal, connecting Mathieu’s personal sensibilities with a sense of history and an awareness of the current global conversation surrounding identity, sexuality, and spirit.

For his inaugural solo exhibition, Familiar Spirits, at Kavi Gupta, Kour Pour has made a body of work instilled with the idea of family—not only that into which we are born, but the families we construct as our personal histories unfold. Pour’s debut at the gallery will present a group of paintings he created around the motif of the tiger. As with past bodies of work, such as his acclaimed carpet paintings, this series contains elements that reference both global art history and various interconnected cultural iconographies.

Kavi Gupta presents Sensory Meridian, a multimedia exhibition of works by Michael Joo. Three new sculptures of disincarnate body parts, alchemized from scans of historical works in the Smithsonian Archives, explore issues of representation, transmission, and transformation. The sculpture From Without features the disembodied face of Anne Sullivan, best known as the teacher and companion of Helen Keller. Present are the features Keller never saw; absent is the mind that enabled both teacher and student to transform. All One Thing features the fist of Abraham Lincoln, copied from a form originally cast on the campaign trail. What's missing is the broom handle Lincoln had to grip in order to make a fist, after reportedly shaking so many hands that he lost muscle control. The third work, All the Other, features a fragment from the sculpted arm of an ancient Greek slave. Scans have revealed that, at some point, this section of the original sculpture was repaired using a cast from an actual human arm—authenticity hidden within artifice. An accompanying collaborative audio-visual installation fills the exhibition space with the whisperings of the voice of a social neuroscientist observing and describing human interactions that we cannot see. Designed to trigger ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response), the quadrophonic audio illustrates the power of absent bodies to stimulate and affect bodies that are present, while the video, showing fragments of the neuroscientist's head while she's talking and graphical sound analytics, further explores disconnected presences and mediated realities.

Kavi Gupta proudly presents Deborah Kass: Painting and Sculpture, the gallery’s inaugural solo exhibition with the artist. Pairing a stunning new body of work with select historical pieces, the exhibition creates an unflinching examination of the American condition before and during the Trump presidency. The canonized giants of Pop Art and Minimalism defined themselves by their opposition to each other: Pop Art could be anything; Minimalism was everything Pop Art wasn’t. However, as a young artist, Deborah Kass saw things differently. Pop and Minimalism were both equally radical. Her dual admiration, along with her commitment to examining the political climate of today, expresses itself abundantly in this show.

Kavi Gupta presents Roger Brown: Hyperframe, an exhibition bringing together an unprecedented selection of multi-frame paintings by one of America’s greatest imagists.

For The Weight, Tasset mined the innermost provinces of the contemporary human psyche, responding to the anxiety of our times with wit, gravitas, and salt-of-the-earth sagacity. Working in his western Michigan studio like an aesthetic Dr. Frankenstein assembling an assortment of Post-Modernist monsters—part Woody Guthrie, part Robert Crumb, part Jeff Koons, part Louise Bourgeois—Tasset has concocted a confident, unified sculptural statement he describes as “a reckoning; an apocalyptic mix-tape.”

Gibson’s jubilant and ever-evolving practice blends the aesthetic heritages of Native America, rave culture, and punk rock, breathing new life into the traditions of Modernist Abstraction. In his paintings, sculptures, garments, performances and films, indigenous craftwork and ancient abstract references coalesce to form metaphysical bridges between 20th century art movements like Geometric Abstraction, Neo-Dada and Pop Art, and contemporary fields of inquiry such as Relational Aesthetics, Institutional Critique and Identity Politics. For CAN YOU FEEL IT, his first solo exhibition at Kavi Gupta, Gibson presents 14 new paintings and sculptures—including the debut of a never-before-shown body of quilted works. Inspired by four years in the mid-1990s when Gibson called Chicago home, the exhibition’s title echoes the classic house jam of the same name by Chicago-born DJ Larry Fine, a.k.a. Mr. Fingers. Says Gibson, “This was a period when house music was so welcoming and inclusive, and being in Chicago was very optimistic. There was a space carved out for people of different backgrounds coming together and celebrating each other, letting everything go and having a good time. It felt hopeful. That was a big critical experience for me in terms of thinking about how to respond to a challenging larger culture.” Included in CAN YOU FEEL IT are three new works from Gibson’s ongoing Punching Bag series (2013–present). Appropriating iconic Everlast punching bags as sculptural supports, Gibson mobilizes bead work, weaving, tassels, and other material interventions to transform objectified targets for abuse into conceptual symbols of strength and beauty. Above all, Gibson’s Punching Bags sparkle with life. As with many of Gibson’s works, they come embedded with references to music, philosophy and pop culture. Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered (2019) takes its title from an American Standard first sung by Vivienne Segal in the 1940 Broadway premiere of Pal Joey (since covered by Ella Fitzgerald, Linda Ronstadt, and Doris Day, among others). All I ever wanted, all I ever needed (2019) reflects the chorus of Enjoy the Silence, the 1990 smash single by British synth-pop band Depeche Mode. Trapped in the dream of the other (2019) quotes French Post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925 – 1995), who remarked, “If you’re trapped in the dream of the Other, you’re fucked.” The eight new paintings in CAN YOU FEEL IT similarly bear such culturally percipient titles as, “I’ve never met anyone quite like you before” (from Temptation, by New Order), “To say I love you right out loud” (from Both Sides Now, by Joni Mitchell), and “Before the devil knows you’re dead” (attributed to an Irish saying). In these multi-faceted works, text hovers in a state of tension amid brightly colored, dense optic patterning, drawing dynamic distinctions between figure and ground. Finally, Gibson presents the first three of what will eventually be 12 unique quilted pieces—a series that emerged from the performative garments Gibson is currently exhibiting in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.

Kavi Gupta is pleased to present HANNAH, a solo exhibition of new work by Kennedy Yanko (b. 1988, USA). Physicality is essential to Yanko’s sculptural practice. Scouring the urban metal yards and demolition sites of New York City, she seeks out intuitive, physical connections with abandoned materials she can transform in her studio. She has long sought to exert her will on these raw materials, to free them from former actualities, covering their scars and markings to allow new forces to manifest—expressions of atomism and spirit within their present reality. In preparation for HANNAH—her first solo show at Kavi Gupta—Yanko chose to engage in more of an open call and response with the pre-existing narratives of her materials. Says Yanko, “It was a very different experience creating this show. It became about slowing down and taking more time to allow the conceptual aspects to develop as I manipulated and created each work. Initially, while searching for the base materials, I was drawn to metals that had direct characteristics related to their past lives. These markings appeared so perfectly I didn’t feel I had the agency to remove them.” Rather than eliminating evidence of the past—which was about allowing viewers to stay more in the moment with her works—Yanko felt compelled to start incorporating the imposed history of her materials into their present forms. The works in HANNAH express this shift, retaining bits of text and aged, painted surfaces—echoes of their material past. Additionally, Yanko began adding elements such as colored vinyl pieces to her sculptures, in an effort to expand the perspective of the work beyond the sculptures themselves. “I was thinking about tracing the shadows of the work,” she says, “to bring in another element and perspective that provoked the viewer to read the pieces with a different kind of physical involvement. In addition to the metal and the paint skins, I chose blocks of monochromatic color to echo the highlights and lowlights of rust, expanding the work into the space.” The additional contemplative aspects of the work coincide at a juncture of personal transcendence in Yanko’s career—her inaugural solo show at Kavi Gupta gallery aligns with the opening of Before Words, her first solo museum exhibition, opening September 28th at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts (UICA) in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the debut of her first public sculpture on September 24th as part of The Poydras Corridor Sculpture Exhibition of New Orleans, sponsored by the Helis Foundation. It was precisely through reflecting on the struggles that have brought her to this moment that Yanko found herself becoming more sympathetic with the markings that signified the past tribulations of her materials—perhaps it’s no coincidence the word scrap can also mean fight. “I dropped out of school,” says Yanko, “I had every single job in New York City. All of that was about making time to make work. During that process, I didn’t look up very much. I needed to discover my own way.” The title HANNAH grew out of this self analysis. “Because of their (my materials’) adamant presentation of personal history, I couldn’t help but reflect on my own,” Yanko says. “I was thinking about the things I was given. You’re given situations, and it’s really up to you what you do with what you have. My birth name was Hannah Elizabeth Kennedy Yanko. I was given a name, I took what worked and left what didn’t. That was the genesis of my understanding, on a deeply tangible level, that my entire existence boils down to choice, down to perception, and my ability to hone in on that understanding became the foundation in which I began to move through this world.” Yanko’s work has always been about disrupting pre-existing associations. HANNAH announces the arrival of an artist who has welcomed a new paradigm of thinking, in which we consider not only what we are now, but how things have come to us in this moment. And like the paint skins that she adds to her metal pieces, it’s also about how we relate to our surroundings. “The framework supports the skin,” Yanko says, “and the metal becomes the composition that the skin responds to. There’s this play on how they interact and respond to each other. I’m fascinated with paradox, and seeming opposites, when actually they are so dependent on each other. I’m interested in the moment when they come together in that interdependence. One thing can’t exist without the opposing force.”

Kavi Gupta is pleased to present Manish Nai’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, A History of Gestures. Nai’s iconic vision for socially-conscious minimalism has earned him global attention as a crucial voice for Indian art today. Paying mind towards the complex intersections of material culture, art history, class relations, and autobiography, Nai’s geometrically simple forms distill the essence of contemporary Mumbai. Known best for employing indigo-dyed jute, used clothes, and the diverse newspapers of India as the raw material for his practice, Nai’s newest bodies of work expand to include whole used books and mosquito nets. These new bodies of work expand upon Nai’s ongoing meditation on time itself. Time has always been a chief concern in Nai’s practice, compressed layers of paper, jute, and clothing slowly setting into distinct strata like sedimentary rock. The innumerable pages and subtle tonal shifts of his new book pillar sculptures recall that tradition in his work, but their sequencing as distinct layers bring a new kind of clarity to the substance. While the forms are cleaner and more minimal than ever before, the contents remain elusive, refusing access to their text. Their history as books immediately accessible, but their content as text is arrested in time, frozen inside the sculpture. The small compressed books are slightly more generous with access to content, their covers serving as pedestals for their former contents, now twisted into gnarled knots. Text from the books gives brief flickers of legibility, but the organic forms twist and turn away from inquisitive eyes. The mosquito net paintings similarly crystallize time, laying out a history of gestures. Nai stains them with watercolor or thinned acrylic, much of which passes through the thin, perforated surface with ease. While much of the paint may pass through one layer onto another, the remaining stain has a permanence and honesty that almost relates to photography. The surface becomes a frozen moment in time, a perfect portrait of every choice made in making, with no room to hide, no opacity for coverup, no chance for erasure. In the side room, a pyramid comprised of used clothes, compressed into pillars, revisits one of Nai’s signature materials. Nai’s practice at large always circles back to the landscape of contemporary urban India, each material choice (including the books and mosquito nets) a reality of the everyday in Mumbai. The most densely populated megacity in the world, Mumbai is highly cosmopolitan, while still maintaining a distinct Indian character. This mass density of people, history, and material in a common geographic context informs Nai’s use of used clothing, the formation of the clothing into pillars, and the near-architectural logic of their arrangement. These kinds of choices extend to all of the sculptural work in the show, each piece a dense coalescence of material, each material being substantial to contemporary India, and each form based in a logical geometry that is equally related to minimalist sculpture and urban architecture. They are brought to life by Nai’s hand and the organic potential in their manipulation, unexpected possibilities blooming forth from their seemingly mundane substances.