Titus Kaphar “Drawing the Blinds”
Jack Shainman Gallery
This event has ended.
Jack Shainman Gallery presents Titus Kaphar’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition will be presented in two parts. A survey of new paintings, Drawing the Blinds, will be installed at the 513 West 20th Street location while an extension of The Jerome Project entitled Asphalt and Chalk will include drawings and paintings at our 524 West 24th Street space.
Through the manipulation of seemingly classical and canonical imagery, Kaphar introduces us to an alternate history that runs concurrent to the dominant narrative. Truths emerge to reveal the fiction and revisionism inherent in history painting and the visual representation of a moment or memory. Kaphar cuts, slashes, erases, layers and peels back the surface of his paintings. Each method is specific to the subject and meant to ignite and recharge the image, often that of the underrepresented body.
In 1968/2014 and Another Fight For Remembrance: Study, Kaphar uses white washing as an erasure, obscuring or removing the subject entirely. As he describes, “Characters are sometimes entirely removed by the white paint, but often I feel the urge to re-expose a portion of that individual. This can occur through scraping the white paint back with pallet knives, towels, and turpentine. This back and forth allows me to view the whitewash figures in a mysterious space of presence and absence.”
The Jerome Project, a portion of which is also on view at the Studio Museum in Harlem, began in 2011. While researching his father’s prison records, Kaphar came across a startling number of men who shared his father’s full name. Intrigued by the pattern, Kaphar began a series of small portraits of these men based on their mug shots. He then dipped each painting into tar up to at least their mouths, obscuring parts of their faces and affording them the privacy they had lost when their mug shots became part of the public record. In Asphalt and Chalk, Kaphar continues The Jerome Project by drawing composite portraits of multiple Jeromes with chalk on asphalt paper. As he layers the contours and features of each face, one becomes disoriented as one individual begins to bleed into the next. Viewed as groups, both explorations of this series represent a community, specifically of African-American men who are statistically o verrepresented in our nation’s prison population and the criminal justice system.
Media
Schedule
from January 15, 2015 to February 21, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-01-15 from 18:00 to 20:00