Michaela Yearwood-Dan “Be Gentle With Me”

Marianne Boesky Gallery (24th Street)

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Marianne Boesky Gallery presents Be Gentle With Me, a presentation of new paintings by Michaela Yearwood-Dan, Be Gentle With Me.

Yearwood-Dan’s new paintings emerge from her deeply personal reflections on the past two years, notably including the Black Lives Matter movement, the global pandemic, and queer liberation. In Be Gentle With Me, she explores the possibilities of creating space and spaces—physical, pastoral, metaphorical and even chimeric vis-à-vis her social and political positions as a queer Black feminist woman. Across a series of works, the artist presents lush, abstract, non-realistic habitats teeming with a panoply of botanical motifs and forms. She also inscribes writing onto the canvas, frequently comprised of her own poetry and epigrams as well as lyrical and comedic references and questions about her own artmaking, contemporary culture, and demotic language that all appear with varying degrees of focus and legibility. Her words beckon the viewer into a vivid, invitational world of paradox, play, and contemplation formed from a palette of Battenberg pinks and yellow and rondos of dripping blues, blanket teals, wet blacks, and vivid greens—all operating according to an indeterminable yet otherworldly logic.

Michaela Yearwood-Dan lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Tiwani Contemporary (2019), One English Pound, Sarabande, The Lee Alexander McQueen Foundation (2019); New Contemporaries, Baltic, Gateshead and Block 336, London (2018); After Cesaire/Morden Tropiques, Platform Southwark, London (2018).