WINFRED REMBERT: HARD TIMES
Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present Hard Times, by the artist Winfred Rembert. The consistently powerful and original oeuvre he left behind is a testament to the improvisational skill, determination and resilience required of a visionary shaped by a lifetime of extreme adversity.
May 30 - August 25, 2024
The exhibition includes paintings from two of the artist’s most recognizable bodies of work—the Cotton Field and Chain Gang collections. Reflecting his upbringing on a sharecropping field in Georgia in the 1950s and his labor on a prison chain gang in the 1960s and ‘70s, the exhibition is dedicated to a pair of harrowing but formative chapters in Rembert’s life.
The sculpturally carved and painted leather here bear exquisite detail—each worker’s clothing is adorned with carefully crafted seams, featuring intricate beveling that adds unexpected depth. Equally novel is Rembert’s perspectival daring; the horizontal foreground sharply transitions to a rising verticality, absent of a discernible skyline.
Rembert’s works range from straightforwardly illustrative to extremely complex compositions that verge on abstraction. In the latter category is ‘All of Me’ (Date unknown), a work that teems with the bent bodies of men in black-and-white striped prison uniforms digging ditches and breaking rocks on the chain gang.
Recalling the grueling physical labor he endured, Rembert states, ‘The mental cruelty may have been worse than the physical cruelty.’ Collectively the figures in ‘All of Me’ represent the multiple personae he adopted to survive such inhumane treatment while incarcerated.
It was Rembert’s wife Patsy who encouraged the artist to begin tooling and painting the story of his life on leather—a skill he first learned from a fellow incarcerated man in Georgia—to transform his pain into redemption.
Accompanying the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth is a presentation of their love letters written while Rembert was imprisoned from 1965 to 1974. These documents of their extraordinary exchange, shared here with the public for the first time, chronicle the journey of mutual affection and hope they took together during this traumatic period. In his memoir, Rembert marvels at the impact his writing had on Patsy, noting, ‘I convinced her to wait for me, just through letters,’ and adding, of their budding romance, ‘I just couldn’t believe good things finally happened to me.’