Artist Simone Leigh at Matthew Marks Gallery
From the gallery's website:
Over the past twenty years, Simone Leigh has created a multi-faceted body of work dedicated to her ongoing exploration of Black female-identified subjectivity. Leigh is best known for her sculptures that incorporate forms associated with African diasporic traditions. In the artist’s own words, “It makes something new. Sometimes, it collapses time. Sometimes, it makes similarities that may have happened over a millennium more obvious.”

Each of Leigh’s new sculptures presents an image of a partially abstracted female body. By “abstracting the figure,” Leigh explains, “I imagine a kind of experience, a state of being, rather than one person.” Artemis (2022–24) is a life-size sculpture of a headless woman with a skirt comprised of breast-like forms. The surface of the sculpture is covered with intricate lace drapery made from porcelain. Another new sculpture is a larger-than-life-size bust of a woman, also headless, and completely covered in hundreds of miniature, hand-rolled porcelain rosettes. The highly detailed surfaces of these works reference the repetition of handwork and unacknowledged acts of labor and care traditionally associated with women’s work.

Tags:   art sculpture contemporary art Matthew Marks Gallery Simone Leigh sphinx

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