Tariku Shiferaw “It’s a love thang, it’s a joy thang”

Galerie Lelong

[Image: Tariku Shiferaw "Cranes in the Sky (Solange)" (2020) Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 in.]

This event has ended.

Galerie Lelong & Co. presents It’s a love thang, it’s a joy thang, our first solo exhibition with Tariku Shiferaw.

Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and currently based in New York City, Shiferaw’s practice of mark-making references the historicity of abstract painting and its hierarchical structures embedded in scholarship. It’s a love thang draws inspiration from the ongoing movement of Black joy that has increasingly gained momentum among creatives as a source of community-building and healing.

The exhibition will present new works to the public from Shiferaw’s ongoing series of paintings One of These Black Boys, which the artist began working on a larger scale in the past year. Titled after songs from musical genres by artists of the African diaspora such as Hip-hop, R&B, Reggae, Afrobeats, Blues, and Jazz, the paintings reiterate the artists’ stage names and song titles. Both stretched on canvas and draped from the wall, the paintings intentionally hold space for the Black bodies and cultures they represent. For Shiferaw, working in abstraction entails a re-envisioning of identity and form, the gestural surface in his paintings and mark-making is his reclamation of a space that was denied to many artists.

Museum exhibitions that have presented works by Tariku Shiferaw include the 2017 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; A Poet*hical Wager at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Ohio; Unbound at the Zuckerman Museum of Art (ZMA), Kennesaw, Georgia; Men of Change, a traveling exhibition organized by The Smithsonian Institution, and currently on view at the Anacostia Community Museum, Washington, DC and California African American Museum, Los Angeles; and What’s Love Got to Do with It? at The Drawing Center, New York, New York. Shiferaw has participated in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art (Studio), in Open Sessions at The Drawing Center, and he was artist-in-residence at the LES Studio Program in New York City. Shiferaw is currently an artist-in-residence at the World Trade Center through Silver Art Projects.

Shiferaw was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1983, raised in Los Angeles, California, and now lives and works in New York City.