FRANTZ ZEPHIRIN

Zephirin’s paintings show a reality that commemorates and remains at odds with itself. A deity becomes a giraffe, a zebra, and a fish. A war scene converges with a chorus in ecstasy, and an orgy emerges from two humanoid faces built by leaves. In Frantz Zephirin work’s, rhythm seems to indicate the undulation of meaning beyond the parameters of logic. Dreams and offerings merge, and a retelling of tradition and invention are told by the mind of a painter, that is also, a voodoo priest. His work often depicts ‘The Invisible Ones (The Loas)’ mutating into animals, plants, and humans. This decision signals a profound change in the re-presentation of voodoo deities. Unlike Andre Pierre and many of his followers, (who gave faces to the representation of voodoo deities with their specific syncretic actions and attributes), Zephirin’s figures transcend those attributes, and are seen in a state of becoming. We witness an expansion of the religious into the realm of art, moving beyond the space of illustration, venturing into the tension of the transformative and the reality of initiations.  

Frantz Zephirin b.1968, Cap-Haitien, Haiti. Zephirin was awarded the Gold Medal in the Third Biennial of Caribbean and Central American Painting sponsored by The Museum of Modern Art of the Dominican Republic. His work was included in the V Biennial in Cuenca, Ecuador; the El-Saieh Gallery in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, among other venues.  His paintings were included la Biennale di Venezia’s “The Milk of Dreams” curated by Cecilia Alemani; 2022. A solo presentation of his work opened in March 2022, at the Williams College Museum of Art, Massachusetts; curated by Tomm El-Saieh. 

BRUCE NAUMAN

‘Raw War’ (1971)’, ‘Study for Holograms A & E (1970)’ and ‘Infrared Outtakes (2006)’ are all on loan from the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody. This selection of works exemplifies the artists experimentation with text and his use of the body and documenting of the body to create work with what he had on hand. Games or distortions of language and body are the medium and the viewer is given the opportunity to see the significance in the simple, yet powerful actions documented.

Bruce Nauman has been recognized since the early ‘70s as one of the most innovative and provocative of America’s contemporary artists. Confronted with the question “What to do?” in his studio soon after leaving school, Nauman had the simple but profound realization that “If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.” Working in the diverse mediums of sculpture, video, film, printmaking, performance, and installation, Nauman concentrates less on the development of a characteristic style and more on the way in which a process or activity can transform or become a work of art. A survey of his diverse output demonstrates the alternately political, prosaic, spiritual, and crass methods by which Nauman examines life in all its gory details, mapping the human arc between life and death. The text from an early neon work proclaims: “The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.” Whether or not we—or even Nauman—agree with this statement, the underlying subtext of the piece emphasizes the way in which the audience, artist, and culture at large are involved in the resonance a work of art will ultimately have. Nauman lives in New Mexico.

ROBERT NAVA

‘Eye To Eye With Ghost (2019)’, on view from the collection of Beth DeWoody, engages with the horror stories of our childhoods—the witches and the ghosts of our nightmares. The image is both magical and dystopian, inspiring fear but also a bit of wonder and child-like playfulness—one gets the idea that these are not in fact such horrifying creatures but perhaps just children in costume. This might be perhaps the only actual rendering of the pop cultural visual trope of the ‘witch’ in black hat with broom. While most works in the exhibition seek to reclaim our visions and understanding of the archetype of the witch, there is something to be said about this imagined Disney-esque wicked witch, who nonetheless engages with the ghost, with the spirit realm, looking the realm of our ancestors directly in the eyes without fear.

Driven by his desire to “make new myths” responsive to our times, Robert Nava has created a chimerical world of metamorphic creatures, drawing inspiration from sources as disparate as prehistoric cave paintings, Egyptian art, and cartoons. Rendered through a raw, energetic mixing of spray paint, acrylics, and grease pencil, his large-scale paintings of fantastical beasts exude a playful candidness that defies the pretensions of high art and invites viewers to reconnect with the unbridled imagination of their childhoods. To develop his uncompromisingly personal style, Nava first dispensed with the rules and conventional attitudes that he had learned while obtaining his MFA at Yale University—an attitude that aligns him with the irreverent “bad” painting first theorized in 1978 by the New Museum’s founding curator Marcia Tucker. Nonetheless, Nava’s hybrid monsters, which range from the dragon-like to the angelic, are thought-out composites that the artist continuously reworks in his sketchbooks. Drawing, in fact, constitutes the bedrock of his practice, a daily discipline of invention.

HENRY CHAPMAN

On loan from the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody, ‘Bad News (2019)’ looks like a seal to commemorate the bad—bad news, omens, men and lands. Alternatively, it might be a clock with the dial stopped at the most recent bad news from the political news cycle, or an ominous omen of what’s to come.

Henry Chapman’s work has been described as “making a case for rigorous attentiveness to the interaction among forms.” The subject of solo-and two-person shows at Kate Werble Gallery, T293 Gallery, Labs Gallery in Bologna, and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chapman has received support from the Philip Guston and Musa McKim Named Residency at Yaddo, the Elizabeth Canfield Hicks Prize, and the Hans G and Thordis W Burckhardt Foundation. He trained at The Cooper Union, where he was awarded Young Alumnus of the Year in 2013, and at Yale University, where he completed his MFA in 2015.

FRANK WALTER

These paintings range in subject from miniature landscapes, many of them Scottish; to abstract explorations of nuclear energy; to portraits, both real and imagined, including seminal images of Hitler playing cricket (what else would the Führer do on a visit to Antigua? Of course, he’d play cricket like everyone else) and Charles and Diana as Adam and Eve, freshly arrived in an island paradise. His works are painted with a rare immediacy, on whatever material came to hand. ‘Man Eaten by Shark’ is on view from the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody. 

Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter, self-styled 7th Prince of the West Indies, Lord of Follies, and the Ding-a-Ding Nook, was born in Antigua in 1926. He was prodigiously talented as both a writer and artist, but his undeniable genius was flawed by delusions of aristocratic grandeur, namely a belief that the white slave owners in his ancestry linked him to the noble houses of Europe, from Charles II to Franz Joseph of Austria and the Dukes of Buccleuch. As a young man, aged just 22 in 1948, Walter tasted success as the first man of color to manage an Antiguan sugar plantation, but although widely revered on the island for his intellect and achievements he left it all behind to tour Europe in pursuit of new skills and his own increasingly convoluted genealogical meanderings. A visit to Scotland in the ‘50s marked the beginnings of a life-long affection for a country to which he repeatedly returned in his imagination and in his paintings. Walter’s remarkable gifts were the product of a fertile, but fragile, mind and having returned to the Caribbean in the ‘60s he spent time farming a small holding of land in Dominica and running a make-shift photo-studio in the Antiguan capital St John’s. The last fifteen years of his life were lived in an isolated self-built house on an Antiguan hillside, surrounded by his writings, some 25,000 closely typed pages of history, philosophy and autobiography, and by the extraordinary paintings and carvings that speak with such an unmistakable and visionary voice.

DALTON GATA

His work ‘Vampiro Tropical’, on loan from the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody is a self-portrait of the artist as not only a vampire but also as a vase for tropical flowers. The face contors into a partial grin, partial grimace, flowers sprouting from the cavity of the figures’s head. Gata’s works take the form of the exquisite corpse, an assemblage, operating through humor and melancholy alike, drawing on the visual language of surrealism and stylized realism to situate us in a liminal, crossover space – between dreaming and waking life, fantasy and reality. His work centers this hybridity, with characters that include fusions of multiple creatures, bodies, and temporalities. Gata’s canvases explore the liminal border zone between fantasy, reality, familiar, grotesque, uncanny, urbanity and the rural.

Gata draws on a personal archive of images to explore queer and popular culture as well as psychological and mythical symbols. The artist’s works create complex narratives that bring to life his own experience of immigration and the diasporic conditions of Cuba in the Caribbean. Gata is represented in ICA Miami’s permanent collection, and his work has been presented in galleries internationally. He received a BFA in fashion design from the Altos del Chavón Design School, Santo Domingo.

The characters in his recent body of work take on lives that extend and diverge beyond the originator, usually the artist’s own friends and family. They are arranged in constellations reminiscent of Renaissance portraiture, rigid in posture, icily returning the gaze of the viewer, they seem to make a claim for their own agency and inner world. The feminine figures in these works are unapologetic, centered in the composition, adornments to the body like hair and heels act to extend and facilitate the occupation of space. Gata’s luminous and vivid paintings are celebrations of these figures, reverent and enamored, Gata builds his house to commemorate them. Besides evoking the canon of renaissance painting, Gata’s work builds upon Latin American Surrealism, drawing on his own background, foregrounding the overlapping cultures of the Caribbean which are deeply rooted in African and Spanish histories.

MICHAEL AJERMAN

‘Mermaid and Vampire (2017-18), on view from the Collection of Beth DeWoody, is almost humorous in its depiction of a mermaid lazing in a seductive manner on what appears to be a beach, as a vampire descends upon her from above, his arms outstretched to meet her, embrace her, or perhaps devour her. The two stares at each other, frozen mid action, locked in an energetic exchange.

Michael Ajerman’s (USA, b. 1977) oil paintings depict private moments of quiet domesticity. The artist’s still life and figurative fantasy vignettes employ a gestural style focused on color and brushwork. Frequently populated by subjects real and fictional, Ajerman’s paintings are both intimate and expressive, luscious, and unexpected. His paintings have a depth of color and a gestural nature that gives forma and life to the often-static bodies that populate his works. The figures are rendered in expressionistic ways with brushstrokes that are vibrant and markedly alive.

LEZLEY SAAR

‘How the wanderings of the tiniest floating islands came to the mother of waters (2017)’, will be on display from her ‘Gender Renaissance’ series. The work is a portrait of a trans woman that she imagined from the early 1900s who seems to glide into frame under a full moon, on top of a melting glacial ice shelf. Painted upon patterned fabric backgrounds reminiscent of Victorian wall coverings, the entire series reexamined conceptions of gender, race, and colorism from historic and imagined figures of the 19th Century.

Lezley Saar is a mixed-media artist and painter. Her artwork deals with themes of identity, race, gender, beauty, normalcy, and sanity. She has exhibited internationally, and nationally, and her work is included in museum collections such as The Kemper Museum, CAAM, The Auckland Art Museum, and MOCA. Born in Los Angeles to artist parents. Her mother Bettye Saar is an African American assemblage artist and her father Richard Saar, was a ceramist and art restorer. Themes of race, gender, neurology, and sexuality are all longstanding concerns in Saar’s work. Her paintings and tapestries often address the power of conjuring one’s reality and finding truth in the surreal as well as mining the language and symbols of owns own personal history to create meaningful objects and visual iconography.

NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE

On loan from the Niki de Saint Phalle foundation are two works that informed or are versions of large-scale public projects. ‘Fontaine aux quatre Nanas (1988-1990)’ is a table-top piece of four women joyfully playing in a circular water feature—this piece was produced large-scale as a functioning fountain, water flowing from the breasts and hands of the four figures.

Niki de Saint Phalle produced fantastical and figurative houses, parks, and playgrounds. These structures were charged spaces of imagination from which she envisioned experimental societies emerging, places “where you could have a new kind of life, to just be free.” Central to this vision was ‘Tarot Garden’, a massive sculptural installation outside of Rome, open to the public since 1998. The intricate detailing and organic shapes of the garden’s structures, based on the 22 Major Arcana of the tarot deck, underscore Saint Phalle’s belief that art can alter perception and shift reality. Saint Phalle also engaged with the politics of social space in her work. Addressing subjects that ranged from women’s rights to climate change and HIV/AIDS awareness, she was often at the vanguard in addressing pressing issues of her time.

‘Sphinx (1990)’, might be understood as an interpretation of The Empress from the Tarot Garden. The figure is regal, her crown atop her large feminine body that still retains the haunches of a lion.  These works are examples of Niki de Saint Phalle life-long engagement with the power of the female form as well as her long trajectory of making public fountains and using water in her works. Her magical creatures maintain ancient archetypes like the sphinx, the snake, the Venus—her forms are primordial and yet she imagined them for new experiential audience. Her relationship with the esoteric, tarot and other spiritual practices was not separate from her art-making practice which seems to be a clear case-study for the artists role as conduit for the divine, the creation of objects as sites for spiritual manifestation.

Niki de Saint Phalle produced fantastical and figurative houses, parks, and playgrounds. These structures were charged spaces of imagination from which she envisioned experimental societies emerging, places “where you could have a new kind of life, to just be free.” Central to this vision was ‘Tarot Garden’, a massive sculptural installation outside of Rome, open to the public since 1998. The intricate detailing and organic shapes of the garden’s structures, based on the 22 Major Arcana of the tarot deck, underscore Saint Phalle’s belief that art can alter perception and shift reality. Saint Phalle also engaged with the politics of social space in her work. Addressing subjects that ranged from women’s rights to climate change and HIV/AIDS awareness, she was often at the vanguard in addressing pressing issues of her time.

BONY RAMIREZ

‘Bayahibe’ (2022), on loan from the collection of Priscila & Alvin Hudgins, features a nude woman emerging from or bathing in a bright aquamarine sea, her eyes covered by her hands, framed by soft rose-colored curtain that seems to have just been raised to reveal her. The woman feels like a contemporary Caribbean Venus, birthed from the waters and yet shielding her vision from the public gaze. 

Self-taught artist Bony Ramírez paints large-scale figures inspired by his childhood memories of the Dominican Republic, cartoonish children’s illustrations, and the anatomical inaccuracies of the Italian Mannerist painters. Ramírez paints his distorted figures on paper using acrylic wash, colored pencils, and oil pastels before cutting them out and pasting them to wood panels decorated with backgrounds painted in acrylics. The characters in his narrative paintings often possess outsized eyes and body parts, as in ‘The Last Day, Ultimo Día En El Campo (2021)’, in which a boy walks on distended and discolored feet, holding a tire with clubbed fingers. he artist has spoken about how the Caribbean ocean is an essential part of his experience growing up and as such an extension of his work, The longing for the Caribbean warmth and sea after relocating to New Jersey and the feelings of displacement or longing for this childhood surroundings are frequently explored in his work. In addition to his painting practice, Ramírez also produces figurative sculptures with clay, resin, and other materials. The New Jersey–based artist has been exhibiting his work since 2014 and participated in a group show at the Hudson Valley Museum of Contemporary Art in 2019, for which he received a Visitors Choice Award.