Jerrell Gibbs, Top Down, 2019. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.
Jerrell Gibbs
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Jerrell Gibbs' paintings depict the simple beauties of everyday life, highlighting scenes with engaging swathes of color and ephemeral elements. The perspective through which Gibbs highlights black identity is an instructive homage to artists like Matisse, whose mode of expression employed heavily decorative elements – which Gibbs makes his own with an authentic, layered style. His work has been exhibited at Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago, with a forthcoming solo show at its Paris gallery slated for 2022. Gibbs' paintings are in the permanent collection of The Columbus Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, LACMA, and X Museum, Beijing.
Amani Lewis, Into the Valley, the Boy Walks (Psalms 23:4), 2020. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.
Amani Lewis
Amani Lewis aims to pivot away from the often manipulated narratives that dominate the public perception of Baltimore, Maryland, through their dynamic practice. Lewis showcases the deeper complexities of the city, widening the subject's perspective and their relationship with the notions of power and community. Lewis' approach combines photography, digital collage, screen printing, and various surface textures to turn portraits into vibrant sites of myth, becoming, and engagement. Through these electric monographs, Lewis embraces the inherent agency of each individual's narrative, cumulatively raising their voices as ones that grow with the community at large. Lewis will be the focus of an upcoming solo show at Salon 94, New York, from November 12 through December 18.
Tyler Ballon, Mary and Christ, 2017. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.
Tyler Ballon
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Tyler Ballon is inspired by early Christian artwork and the environment of his native Jersey City. The youngest of four, Ballon grew up in the church – both of his parents were pastors who raised their children in the Pentecostal tradition – and noticed the absence of Black people in the religious iconography he saw daily. His works narrate the experiences of the Black community through the framing context of the bible, opening spaces for Ballon to dialogue with and create empathy among people who might not be familar with these experiences. Ballon still lives and works in his home city; after attending MICA in Baltimore, where Amy Sherald became a mentor of his, he returned to his roots and today two artists both have studios at Mana in Jersey City. In addition to his auction debut, Ballon has a concurrent solo show opening on November 13 at Deitch Projects in New York.
Hiejin Yoo, Facing South home gets more sunlight, 2017. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.
Hiejin Yoo
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South Korean-born Hiejin Yoo paints vignettes of everyday life, often with inspirations from her early life and the changing environments she experienced as a student in Chicago, and currently as an artist Los Angeles. Yoo maintains a diary of drawings that she references for intimate snapshots of her personal life and wider concepts in her paintings like feelings of place and belonging. Her figures are usually marked with bold, white outlines, moving the viewer's primary focus to the innate emotions of the piece instead of the material qualities of the given moment captured. Having exhibited along with Daniel Heidkamp at Half Gallery, Miami, in 2021, Yoo will be the focus of a solo show at Half Gallery's New York space in January of 2022. Her work sits in the public collections of the Pérez Collection, Miami, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection (The Bunker), Miami, and The Hort Family Collection, New York.
Wahab Saheed, Actual Queen, 2020. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.
Wahab Saheed
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Wahab Saheed paints portraits of Black identities from the perspective of his Nigerian experience. His practice is rendered through angular and quick brushwork that offsets the balanced fields of the spaces his subjects occupy. In doing so the artist demonstrates the physical presence and spirituality that these subjects project to the viewer. The artist paints the friends and family members in his community as they face the extraordinary times brought on by the pandemic with remarkable strength. Concurrent to his auction debut with Phillips, Saheed's work will be exhibited at Nanzuka Underground, Tokyo.
Ewa Juszkiewicz, Girl in Blue, 2013, 20th Century & Contemporary Art.
Ewa Juszkiewicz
Ewa Juszkiewicz engages with history’s portrayal of the female sitter and the ways in which past cultural imperatives persist. Though often considered a portraitist, Juszkiewicz is just as committed to the tradition of still life. Often replacing her figure’s head with vanitas imagery, the artist comments on the transience of beauty which works in conjunction with the lack of identity bestowed on her sitters. Through this subversion, she situates herself within the lineage of 20th and 21st century artists who have explored the history of effacement — from Magritte’s Surrealist portraits, to Francis Bacon’s fantastical popes, to Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s more recent hybrid, fractured renderings. After shows in her native Poland, Juszkiewicz's work has been recently exhibited at Frieze Art Fair, New York, in 2021, which has heightened her popularity and interest in her practice.
Kwesi Botchway, Green Sofa, 2020. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.
Kwesi Botchway
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Part of the new generation of West African painters, Ghanian artist Kwesi Botchway employs a unique visual vocabulary that places him among the vital contemporary figurative painters who seek to reframe Black narratives within the art historical canon. In 2020, the present work featured in the artist’s celebrated solo show, Dark Purple is Everything Black, at Gallery 1957 in Accra, Ghana. A critical element in Botchway’s oeuvre, the fashion of his figures is an important complement to their dispositions — the matching colors of the figure’s clothes and furniture is a device similarly seen in his groundbreaking triple self-portrait Metamorphose in July, on which he explains, “I am signifying the instinctive way we change with time, whether we are ready or not. One’s ability to remain true to their core no matter their changing nature.” Botchway's auction debut follows a successful solo show at London's Gallery 1957 entitled Becoming as well as Being.
Honor Titus, Linden Blvd Jazz Radio, 2019. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.
Honor Titus
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Honor Titus grew up immersed in the cultural arts scene in New York during the late 1990s and early 2000s. As the son of rapper Andres “Dres” Titus of the famed duo Black Sheep, his childhood and teenage years were spent around poets and musicians, but it was working as a studio assistant to Raymond Pettibon that ignited a spark and passion for painting in young artist. His practice has since developed into its unique artistic language and culminates in works such as Linden Blvd Jazz Radio, with its emphasis on flatness of lines, colors, and decorative elements. In January of 2020, Titus exhibited at Henry Taylor's studio in Los Angeles, where his paintings quickly made waves with collectors like Beth Rudin DeWoody, and later in the year at Karma Gallery, New York.
Florine Démosthène, ...But I Have To, 2019. 20th Century & Contemporary Art.
Florine Démosthène
M. Florine Démosthène uses elements of collage and multimedia to depict figures immersed in dystopian spaces. The otherworldly quality of her work is grounded by the Black female body, which the artist engages as visual shorthand for the collective experiences of her subjects, all beyond base themes of sensuality and simplified interpretation. Démosthène's use of mylar creates a sense of impermanence in the background, making her figures appear transluscent or floating through the space. This illusive style is deliberately luring, as the artist's sparkling surfaces and marbled figures often feature aquatic, siren-like elements that blur the horizon of reality and dreams. Public collections of Démosthène's works include the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C, University of South Africa (UNISA), Pretoria, the Lowe Museum of Art, Miami, as well as in private collections worldwide.
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