Oswaldo Vigas: The Voice in the Mirror

Bradford. In an exhibition that extends the artist’s recent formal and thematic investigations while pushing his practice towards distinctly new inventions, Bradford probes the enduring impact of colonialism and concepts of ‘otherness’ through the lens of individual experience.&nbsp;</p><p>Consisting of around 20 new paintings, ‘Exotica’ introduces a signature staining technique, wherein the artist uses caulk to create shadow-like imprints upon the canvas. These forms inject Bradford’s layered compositions with a trace of fantasy, strangeness, and memory. In its diversity of form and material – also encompassing works created with fabric dye, inked-paper, and oxidized paper – the exhibition reflects the continued evolution of Bradford’s play with figuration.&nbsp;</p><p>The exhibition’s title references a 1968 encyclopedia that catalogued exotic plants from a western perspective, for a western reader. The text took on special significance for Bradford in the way it reflects a colonial impulse to document and categorize the things perceived as ‘other,’ and the idea that naming something equates to understanding. Bradford took this catalogue as a starting point to consider how we create, imagine, and internalize such concepts of the ‘exotic,’ turning inward to examine his own preconceptions of what things are, and how those same preconceptions define his reality and experience.&nbsp;</p><p>Fifteen detail works take viewers into the woods – not any woods, but the woods of the artist’s imagination. As a black man growing up in an urban environment, Bradford attends to his own perceptions of the woods as something dangerous and foreign. These richly layered paintings extend Bradford’s treatment of the themes of migration and displacement, evoking the threats of a journey to, and through, the unknown.&nbsp;</p><p>The exhibition is anchored by five large-scale figurative works centered on the agave plant. A monocarpic variety, agave plants bloom only once, at the end of their lifecycle. Bradford was drawn to the idea that agave exposes its richness and full embodiment only once within its life, as a metaphor for peoples whose colonized conditions require them to conform and adapt to their circumstances, rather than to flourish.&nbsp;</p><p>Notably, this new body of works signals a significant shift in perspective, setting the viewer eye-to-eye with Bradford’s compositions and the fictions of the ‘exotic’ they contain.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p>" />

new paintings by Sterling Ruby</a> from the TURBINE series (2021–), opening at the gallery in Hong Kong on November 14, 2024. The title, |, is an ode to verticality. This exhibition marks not only ten years since the artist’s debut with Gagosian, but also a return to the site of that inaugural presentation.</p><p>In a practice that spans painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, video, ceramics, and textiles, Ruby alludes to key artistic tendencies and to the intersection of sociopolitical histories with the narrative of his own life. Through formal juxtaposition, he interweaves the disruption of aesthetic convention with the reexamination of civil structures. In Ruby’s 2014 exhibition VIVIDS, large-scale spray paintings seemed to gaze into the horizon in apparent anticipation of changes to come. Those works’ horizontal orientation stands in stark contrast to the precariously balanced compositions of the new TURBINE paintings on view in Hong Kong.</p><p>Each work contains a central totemic form built from thin strips of cardboard encrusted with oil paint. These columns sit atop fields of equally thick paint spread across colored canvas. Formally and socially, verticality defines integrity. Historically a measurement of excellence, it is associated with progress, status, and respect. It is also, however, subject to collapse. For a person to collapse indicates exhaustion or illness, conditions alluded to in the titles of Ruby’s paintings Syncope and Keel (all works 2024). For a building to collapse indicates passage—of time, function, use, regime, or war.</p><p><br></p>" />