SOCIAL ABSTRACTION
Gagosian presents Social Abstraction. The show in Beverly Hills features work by Kyle Abraham, Kevin Beasley, Allana Clarke, Theaster Gates, Cy Gavin, Alteronce Gumby, Lauren Halsey, Kahlil Robert Irving, Devin B. Johnson, Rick Lowe, Eric N. Mack, Cameron Welch, and Amanda Williams. It will be followed this fall by a second iteration in Hong Kong.
July 18 – August 30, 2024
The intergenerational assembly of Black artists in Social Abstraction explores the intersections of nonrepresentational form and social consciousness. Moving between and beyond the poles of abstraction and figuration, they form shapes to become landscape and cityscape, color to reveal people and explore the limits of perception, and texture to map the totality of lived experience.
Spanning twenty-eight feet in length, Rick Lowe’s collage painting Cavafy Remains (2024) is dedicated to Greek poet C. P. Cavafy. The large-scale work is structured by intersections and nodes that evoke lettering, maps of urban infrastructure, and the forms of domino games in a layered weave of vivid colors and intersecting lines.
With its saccharine palette and layered, syrupy surface, CandyLadyBlack (This Stuff Is Starting Now) (2023) by Amanda Williams conjures a sense of nostalgia, paying tribute to both childhood treats and the figure of the “Candy Lady,” an entrepreneurial fixture of Black American neighborhoods. In Devin B. Johnson’s painting Congealed & Stuck (2024), fluid gestural brushstrokes call to mind the artist’s memories of places and people.
Intrigued by the full range of human perception and the meanings of colors and materials, Alteronce Gumby incorporates agate and bismuth—as well as acrylic paint and glass—into Dreams of a Distant Journey and Zulu (both 2023), bringing the iridescent minerals’ chromatic intensity to the works’ surfaces. Cameron Welch’s The Golden Thread (2024) is a densely composed mosaic of glass, marble, stone, and tile tesserae with passages of oil and acrylic paint.
Theaster Gates’s Line study for alternative columnar projects (2023) is a high-fire stoneware vessel that pushes the physical limits of clay in an investigation of materiality and transmutation. Kahlil Robert Irving’s duo of sculptures mimic concrete and found objects but in fact are conglomerations of ceramic forms modeled by the artist. Covered in layers of enamel and digital collages, the ceramic objects are placed into vitrines that he constructs to reflect their fragility and precious nature.
A special performance by choreographer and dancer Kyle Abraham and members of his company, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, will take place during the opening weekend of Social Abstraction, on July 19 at 6pm. Galvanized by Black culture and history, Abraham’s provocative body of work draws from his engagement with the visual arts.