Amy Sherald, Hauser & Wirth, Londres
With delicacy and gentleness, Amy Sherald has confronted the artistic scene since the early 2000s with the representations and challenges imposed by American society on all African Americans. On the occasion of his first exhibition in Europe at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in London, Slash takes a look to a work that organizes the meeting of the edifying and the intimate.
Oscillating between a rigorous realism and a characteristic stylization, Amy Sherald’s portraits summon the personal stories of her subjects as much as symbols in the slightly fixed and always close to the shift poses they adopt. A sum of signs which contribute to the parallel stories she’s writing. Thrown on plain colored backgrounds, the silhouettes stand out like icons, bearing on their bodies the clues of famous or anonymous biographies.
Amy Sherald, The World We Make, from October 12 to December 23, 2022, Hauser & Wirth, London.
Marked by the tone of 1970s photography, Amy Sherald develops a singular aesthetic where the use of gray defies history as much as symbol. If she uses paint exclusively, the photographic medium carries, according to her, the possibility of a representation freed from the constraints and limitations of pictorial art prior to the end of the 19th century; which is why she gives her painting as a meditation around photography and a way of affirming the existence, in the iconographic field, of a population that history has discarded.
Winner of the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Prize in 2016, her work, part of the American pictorial portrait tradition, gained international notoriety in 2018 by painting an official portrait of Michelle Obama.
Sometimes fixed and concentrated, sometimes escaping into the distance, the gazes of her subjects maintain the constitutive neutrality of the expressions she paints, installing throughout her corpus a systemic coherence that inscribes her work in a larger project. Through her portraits, Sherald does not hesitate to represent her own imagination and even insists on the dimension linked to her own fantasy of a world that she thus repopulates in the light of her own poetry. The titles of his works themselves are part of a narrative that salutes the personality of the models while emphasizing, openly or secretly, the reason for which they appear in his personal pantheon. A murky realism that may have sparked debate but in no way calls into question its respect for the identities that it transcribes. Far from yielding to the injunctions of a general public eager for controversy, his work confronts the role of painting in representation without maintaining the illusion of a commitment that would only be measured by some “visibility”.
The artist advocates a reassessment of the art history and its representations without losing sight of the singular scope and the necessary shift of the work of the image to inscribe in reality the disorder which problematizes it. An approach that finds in 2022 a form of extension in her reinterpretation of great historical moments that she depicts played by new actors. Among them, the couple of the kiss forced by an American sailor during the celebration of the victory of the allies photographed by Eisenstaedt is replaced by two black men, revisiting the milestones of popular imagery.
It is thus in this ambiguous and fascinating vagueness between image, positive representation, appropriation and invention that Amy Sherald’s work navigates, with the ambition of making the best of all situations, a conceptual sobriety that does not prevent, as his gaze seems to sharpen, to offer an exciting perspective on the relationship of our societies to the representation of its own population. Defending, finally, as much as she puts it into play with intelligence, the part of the heritage of the black community in American art.
More information about the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Gallery
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