Amongst Titus Kaphar’s first debuts of his celebrated practice mining historic imagery, My failure, not hers is a striking commentary on Western visual culture featuring tar smeared across the body of an unspecified saint. Exhibited in Kaphar’s first institutional solo exhibition, Titus Kaphar: Painting Undone, curated by Isolde Brielmaier at the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2008, the present work belongs to a series exploring various physical interventions defacing historically inspired paintings. Quoting works from the 18th and 19th centuries, Kaphar styles his underpaintings after the likes of John Singleton Copley, William Blake and Eugène Delacroix. Through reproducing this imagery, Kaphar works to dismantle historic tradition and reinterpret the role these artworks possess in the contemporary moment. Elaborating on his practice, Kaphar has described, “it is in the process of un-doing each painting, of stepping outside the traditional confines and beyond the surface of each piece, that I find the essence of each work.”i
"Art history helped me to realize that painting is a visual language where everything in the painting is meaningful, is important. It's coded."
—Titus KapharKaphar attentively reproduces historic iconography in an academic American and European style only to then rework the painting by smearing tar across its surface, slash through the canvas or unstretch and crumple the work. Creating these disruptions into oil paintings, he challenges the traditional capacities of portraiture by manipulating visibility and invisibility. In covering and defacing historic and religious iconography, Kaphar negotiates with the legacy of representation in these genres. As elaborated by Jason Stanley, “in so doing, he is not being disrespectful to artistic tradition. Quite the contrary, his work acknowledges, and indeed accentuates, the power of a country’s artistic traditions to mold and shape its political traditions. His work is an homage to the political power of art.”ii My failure, not hers addresses the additional layer of religion, depicting a saint who is only identified by a halo and a light-skinned hand. The open-ended title alludes to religious guilt while also rhetorically invoking reclamation.
Kaphar’s interventions into his canvases transcend into the sculptural, as with the smeared tar in the present example. Viscous and opaque, the tar submerges the face and body of a haloed figure in a provocative affront to the weighted religious iconography, as well to as the traditional media of oil on canvas. The two media contrast in a way that exposes the surface and materiality of the underlying painting, addressing— and indeed confirming— the power of art objects. The illegibility of My failure, not hers prompts consideration of themes such as presence and absence and accessibility and denial. The present work is a crucial early example of Kaphar's engagement with tar, foreshadowing his later use of the material in his celebrated 2014 series The Jerome Project. In the contemporary context, it also brings his work into dialogue with that of Theaster Gates, Rashid Johnson and Sanford Biggers, all contemporary Black artists who have used tar in metaphoric investigations into Blackness.
• With works now residing in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Titus Kaphar has exhibited extensively in the United States and internationally with solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, New York and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C. The artist was awarded with a MacArthur fellowship in 2018.
• Represented by Gagosian since 2019, Kaphar’s first exhibition with the Gallery From a Tropical Stance, 2020 was a critical success. His work was also selected for inclusion in the Gallery’s Social Works group exhibition, featuring socially engaged work by Black artists.
• In 2009, Kaphar was the first recipient of the Seattle Art Museum’s Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence fellowship. He’s since received grants from Creative Capital, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Art for Justice Fund and was the recipient of the 2018 Rappaport Prize from the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln.
