Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to announce the upcoming solo exhibition in Chicago by Eva Jospin, entitled&nbsp;Vanishing Points. The show will be on view from November 15, 2024 to January 25, 2025, and will mark the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery and her first in the U.S.&nbsp; In an age of rapid advancement in virtual and augmented reality, Eva Jospin roots her practice in questioning perspective itself. In her tridimensional sculptures and immersive installations, she activates the illusion of depth to shift direct perception and guide the eye to multiple dimensions within each artwork, transforming sight into a conscious, interiorized process. As she explains,&nbsp;“I try to address the landscape as one we are part of—when nature becomes not just a space we observe but one we are inside of, it transforms into an interior, imagined vision.”&nbsp; While the notion of linear perspective was first theorized in the 15th century by Leon Battista Alberti, Jospin’s practice expands this singularity. In&nbsp;Vanishing Points&nbsp;the artist underscores the impossibility of engaging in her work from a single viewpoint. This is formally evidenced in sculptural scenes that unveil their complexity when observed from varying angles, heights, and distances, conjuring a sense of immersion that evokes the presence and immediacy of a rich landscape that has not been flattened by representation. Enlivened through one’s imagination, the work is further heightened and lived as an internal experience.&nbsp; Vanishing Points&nbsp;is a chapter in the artist’s ongoing inquiry into the observer’s connection to their natural and built environment—a dialogue with resonance to the architectural heritage of Chicago, making this exhibition a fitting debut in the city.&nbsp;

Eva Jospin: Vanishing Points

Seven years after launching her namesake gallery in Seattle, Mariane Ibrahim moved their space to Chicago in 2019. In September 2021, the gallery opened their inaugural European space in Paris and in February 2023 opened a location in Mexico City. The gallery has hosted acclaimed exhibitions, with a founding focus on the African diaspora, from leading and emerging artists. The gallery has worked with global renowned institutions and have had an international presence at art fairs with acclaimed and prize-winning presentations. In 2021 Ibrahim was awarded The Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of the Arts and the Letters) on behalf of the Ministry of culture in France. Notable prizes and appointments include the Prize Winner from Presents Section, The Armory Show 2017, current Selection Committee, The Armory Show, current Visionaries Committee, Performa Arts and member of the Art Dealers Association of America. Image: Sol Kordich, Coming back to the one. Installation View. Courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim.

Mariane Ibrahim

Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to present Escaping the tyranny of meaning, a solo exhibition of new work by Leasho Johnson, on view from August 30 until October 26, 2024. This exhibition marks the artist’s first show with the gallery.&nbsp; In reflection of the rich sociologies of Jamaica, the centrality of mythology in Leasho Johnson’s work acknowledges the Caribbean and diasporic heritage to solidify history through folklore and imagination. Johnson’s practice situates imagination as an incubator for uninhibited connection and self-expression. Navigating the complexities of dark, abstract realms, his practice reveals sudden bursts of figuration, where creatures of presence emerge with striking clarity. By blending and experimenting with drawing and painting techniques, Johnson creates lush, vivid images brimming with sensual intensity.&nbsp; Escaping the tyranny of meaning introduces a new body of work inspired by Anansi, the shapeshifting, clever character of West African folklore. Traditionally, Anansi is a spider used to explore moral tales from everyday dilemmas to irresolvable ethical conundrums. By invoking an abstracted form of Anansi, Johnson embraces anthropomorphism to underscore the importance of maintaining freedom within spaces of ambiguity and complexity. In the legacy of Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning, Johnson activates the visceral effects of the macabre to engage diasporic conversations on colonialism, visibility, and folklore as he liberates his figures from the constraints of direct representation or definition.&nbsp;Image: Detail of 'The centipede under two skies (Anansi #27)', 2023. © Leasho Johnson.

Leasho Johnson: Escaping the Tyranny of Meaning

Exhibiting Artists:&nbsp;Bethany Collins&nbsp;McArthur Binion&nbsp;Carmen Neely&nbsp;Zohra Opoku&nbsp;ruby onyinyechi amanzeMichael RakowitzEdra&nbsp;Soto&nbsp; &nbsp;Present in different text-based cultures since antiquity, the notion of the&nbsp;palimpsest&nbsp;has fascinated conservators, historians, and artists through modern history. Through paintings, installations and sculptures, the show explores the way that history is built by competing layers of personal stories, social events, and notions of spirituality and myth, that manifest themselves either explicitly or symbolically in the practices of the presented artists.<a href="https://marianeibrahim.com/exhibitions/85-palimpsest/overview/">Details</a>Image: Handmadeness:four, 2023 © McArthur Binion. Courtesy the artist and GRAY, Chicago/New York

Palimpsest

Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to announce Coming back to the one, a solo exhibition by Berlin-based, Argentinian artist Sol Kordich. The exhibition will open May 29 and continue through July 6.&nbsp; &nbsp;Building upon the well-trodden ground of process-based abstraction, Kordich’s practice employs gesture and color as mediators between two vernaculars: one native to the canvas and another to time itself. Painting for Kordich is a performative process, a biographic choreography that engages her entire body in rhythmic creation. Her marks are loose, open, and characterized by a nonchalance that belies the intention and rhythmic focus of their author. Kordich’s picture planes exude a dense network of strokes and colors that intimate a nascent simmer of tension at each knotty juncture of paint.Kordich’s work begins, like many things do, with herself. If one imagines the space of painting as irreducible to the terrain of canvas and extends to the space and time of its production, Kordich’s paintings become less of a discrete final object and more so selective records of a given time, frame of mind, and haptic occurrence. This density engenders a sense of immersion and sensory richness. Just as the dense foliage of a rainforest overwhelms the senses with its sights, sounds, and scents, Kordich's highly saturated and intricate works envelop the viewer in a tapestry of colors, shapes, and textures, stimulating contemplation.Kordich’s work merges literary rigor and aesthetic sentiment, employing abstraction to connect physicality to the inner musings of the human psyche.Chaos converges into harmony through the interplay of tempo and color in her works, inviting viewers to embark on a journey of discovery.Having originally studied architecture, Kordich’s work is perhaps best summed up as employing one of the most basic, yet difficult, things for any building to achieve: a question of how space is responsible for psychological responses. Coupled with a rigorous journaling practice, Kordich untangles her own musings about the universe, the self, and the invisible forces that shape our existence. Abstraction becomes a means to articulate these explorations without losing the sense of indeterminacy native to a thought’s earliest state of development. In doing so, she forges a symbiotic relationship between words and abstraction, transcending verbal limitations.

Sol Kordich: Coming Back to the One

DURING EXPO CHICAGO, PLEASE JOIN US FOR <a href="https://www.expochicago.com/expo-art-week/art-after-hours">ART AFTER HOURS &nbsp;</a>FRIDAY, APRIL 12THFROM 5-8 PM

Art After Hours 2024

<a href="https://marianeibrahim.com/exhibitions/80-lorraine-o-grady-the-knight-or-lancela-palm-and-steel/overview/">The Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel</a> is Lorraine O’Grady’s first exhibition with Mariane Ibrahim. It is also O’Grady’s first solo presentation to focus on the character of the Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel, her most recent artistic persona.The Knight arrives 40 years after O’Grady’s earlier avatar, the renowned Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, confronted the prevailing racial segregation of the mainstream New York art world through unannounced performances at public art events. The Knight—together with attendants Pitchy-Patchy, her squire, and Rociavant, her horse—has set out to finish what her progenitor began. This time, however, the avatar’s identity is obscured. She wears a custom-forged suit of armor in the Early Renaissance style of the conquistadors, but its symbolic burden is subverted by the botanical Caribbean and other headdresses that alternately sprout from her barred burgonet helmet.O’Grady has been gradually introducing the Knight to the public, beginning in 2021 with the landmark retrospective&nbsp;Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And&nbsp;at the Brooklyn Museum. In the museum’s European galleries, images of the Knight interacted with massive Rodin sculptures and with Early Renaissance paintings.Later in 2021, at the height of the pandemic, O’Grady had herself filmed as the Knight doing a performance-without-audience in selected galleries of the Brooklyn Museum retrospective of her work. Under the watchful and approving gaze of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (invoked by a mannequin clothed in her iconic gown of white gloves nearby) the Knight declared her guiding concerns in the form of 9.5 theses. The edited footage became the “performance-film”&nbsp;Greetings &amp; Theses&nbsp;which premiered at the museum later that year.Although&nbsp;The Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel&nbsp;is young and surprisingly sexy work, it addresses multiple audiences separately and simultaneously. It poses a question that is fundamental to the problem of subjectivity and to the politics of visibility in Western modernity and artistic modernism: “If you conceal everything—race, class, age, gender—what is left? What is possible?”The project amounts to a stunning recapitulation of the main conceptual and political ideas that have driven much of O’Grady’s work as an artist and cultural critic: an anti-hierarchical approach to difference within such binary categories as Black and White, self and other, West and non-West, and past and present. It furthers the artist’s long-standing interrogation of hybridity and multiplicity inscribed in the logic of “both/and,” a conceptual framework she has favored over the binary “either/or” logic inherent in Western philosophy.While research and production for the Knight began in 2013, and weapons training and rehearsals began in 2017 and continue into the present, the persona was shaped, like most of O’Grady’s projects, by a near-constant reprisal and reassessment of prior works, ideas, and personal experiences. From the medieval armor collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which served as important touchstones for O’Grady as she began to conceive of the character and her attendants, to texts such as Howard Pyle’s illustrated novels of King Arthur’s court that she’d learned how to read as a 5-year-old and on to figures like Joan of Arc and Pallas Athena whom she later encountered at Girls Latin School in Boston, nothing escapes or is wasted. To develop the multiple headdresses worn by her persona, O’Grady spent two years studying contemporary carnivals of the Western Hemisphere before finally landing on a hand-colored lithograph in Isaac Mendes Belisario’s 1837 portfolio of Jonkonnu in Jamaica for inspiration.The forthcoming exhibition will offer audiences their most intimate encounter with the Knight yet. The series of four “Announcement Cards” —&nbsp;cartes de visite-style photographic portraits of the Knight in full costume posing variously with sword and lance in hand—will be seen for the first time in a single, contiguous unit as intended by the artist. The four portraits, printed nearly at life size, are complex character studies. They introduce some of the Knight’s defining traits and behaviors and depict her in various stages of becoming, preparing to embark on a series of actions ranging from self-exploration to cultural critique. In addition, two “Family Portraits” — one formal, the other “real” — depict the Knight in relation to her companions. Rociavant is a toy wooden horse reminiscent of those in ancient European and Near Eastern folklore. The other, Pitchy-Patchy, her squire, is based on a combination of characters from Jamaica’s Jonkonnu Christmas festival, which O’Grady’s parents grew up with, as well as from the Wanaragua festival of Belize, where her maternal grandmother was born and raised before moving to Jamaica.Accompanying the recent works will be a select number of earlier photomontage pieces which bring the artist’s vision for the Knight into conceptual and formal relief.&nbsp;The Fir-Palm, for instance, is a piece from 1991 that depicts a tree with a Caribbean palm trunk surmounted by New England fir foliage. The Caribbean trunk (torso) is sprouting from an African woman’s navel. O’Grady reverses this image in&nbsp;Announcement Card 1 (Banana-Palm with Lance), 2020, by depicting the Knight, whose body is encased in European armor, wearing a banana-palm headdress. The 2020 image of the Knight has thus inverted the symbolic position of the Caribbean, so it no longer occupies the space of the body but rather that of the mind. In the same way that many of O’Grady’s individual images from divergent periods function conceptually as diptychs, these two works seem to be O’Grady’s way of saying the intellect and the body can be both Western and non-Western, Northern and Southern, interchangeably, without gain or loss; that one can live equally on both sides. They appear to look forward to a time when such images will no longer have to be repeated.&nbsp;Image: Lorraine O'Grady, Announcement Card 2 (Spike with Sword, Fighting), 2020, Fujiflex print, 60 x 40 in. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago, Paris, and Mexico City) © 2024 Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Lorraine O'Grady: The Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel

Mariane Ibrahim presents Miranda Forrester's first solo exhibition in Chicago, titled <a href="https://marianeibrahim.com/exhibitions/77-miranda-forrester-interiorities/overview/">Interiorities</a>. The show is open February 2nd through April 6, 2024 and marks Forrester’s first show in Chicago and with the gallery.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;As her figures waver between figuration and abstraction throughout her work in Interiorities, Miranda Forrester paints instability at the edge between presence and disappearance. Her figures are liquid and incomplete bodies made from painterly outlines, tenuous gatherings of brushwork, and quick flashes of color. Like the queerness that they are informed by, they are painted in a language of fluidity, complexity, and mutability. Yet, despite the sense of almost frenetic precarity with the figures are rendered, Forrester’s scenes resonate with certain calm and quietude. The Black queer women painted here repose in comfort: they lie in each other’s arms, lean on doorways, and lounge on staircases. Taken together, Forrester’s paintings orient us towards a world in which Black queer people cannot be neatly defined and delimited but instead revel in the sanctity of their quotidian being.&nbsp;Forrester’s paintings are faceless, but they do not lack identities. In this suite of paintings, five figures in the artist’s intimate orbit recur: herself, her partner, her infant daughter, and two of her friends. For the artist and those in her close circle, the figures are instantly recognizable purely from their shape, outline, and affect. Yet at the same time, they are ambiguous enough that the viewer can imagine themselves slipping into their bodies and living in the scene. Her figures simultaneously index precise individuality and slippery amorphousness; they mark the intimacy that is particular to Forrester’s relational life while also making room for the viewer to be touched by their own sentiments of identification and recognition.&nbsp;&nbsp;Instead of painting her worlds on conventional opaque materials like canvas or wood, the artist opts for polycarbonate, a clear, glass-like material often used in architectural construction. Given this unique material configuration, looking at Forrester’s paintings occasions looking through them. We can sneak into the intimacies that work within and behind the painting: the frame and its backing boards, the gallery walls, and the shadows that the paintings cast on them. In turn, the built environment of our own world bleeds into what’s happening in the imagined world of Forrester’s paintings; figures seem to step into our own dimension. The surfaces are windows, transparent openings that allow us to slither in and out of the paintings, making us intimately linked with the life unfolding on the surface.&nbsp; &nbsp;Forrester’s figures float in realms of open possibility. As they emerge into their unfinished states of being against transparent ground, they invite the viewer to envision Black queer women beyond the entrapments of being easily resolved.&nbsp;Excerpted text by writer and critic Zoë HopkinsMariane Ibrahim presents Miranda Forrester's first solo exhibition in Chicago, titled Interiorities. The show is open February 2nd through April 5, 2024 and marks Forrester’s first show in Chicago and with the gallery.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;As her figures waver between figuration and abstraction throughout her work in Interiorities, Miranda Forrester paints instability at the edge between presence and disappearance. Her figures are liquid and incomplete bodies made from painterly outlines, tenuous gatherings of brushwork, and quick flashes of color. Like the queerness that they are informed by, they are painted in a language of fluidity, complexity, and mutability. Yet, despite the sense of almost frenetic precarity with the figures are rendered, Forrester’s scenes resonate with certain calm and quietude. The Black queer women painted here repose in comfort: they lie in each other’s arms, lean on doorways, and lounge on staircases. Taken together, Forrester’s paintings orient us towards a world in which Black queer people cannot be neatly defined and delimited but instead revel in the sanctity of their quotidian being.&nbsp;Forrester’s paintings are faceless, but they do not lack identities. In this suite of paintings, five figures in the artist’s intimate orbit recur: herself, her partner, her infant daughter, and two of her friends. For the artist and those in her close circle, the figures are instantly recognizable purely from their shape, outline, and affect. Yet at the same time, they are ambiguous enough that the viewer can imagine themselves slipping into their bodies and living in the scene. Her figures simultaneously index precise individuality and slippery amorphousness; they mark the intimacy that is particular to Forrester’s relational life while also making room for the viewer to be touched by their own sentiments of identification and recognition.&nbsp;&nbsp;Instead of painting her worlds on conventional opaque materials like canvas or wood, the artist opts for polycarbonate, a clear, glass-like material often used in architectural construction. Given this unique material configuration, looking at Forrester’s paintings occasions looking through them. We can sneak into the intimacies that work within and behind the painting: the frame and its backing boards, the gallery walls, and the shadows that the paintings cast on them. In turn, the built environment of our own world bleeds into what’s happening in the imagined world of Forrester’s paintings; figures seem to step into our own dimension. The surfaces are windows, transparent openings that allow us to slither in and out of the paintings, making us intimately linked with the life unfolding on the surface.&nbsp; &nbsp;Forrester’s figures float in realms of open possibility. As they emerge into their unfinished states of being against transparent ground, they invite the viewer to envision Black queer women beyond the entrapments of being easily resolved.&nbsp;Excerpted text by writer and critic Zoë Hopkins<ul><li><a href="https://marianeibrahimcom.sharepoint.com/:b:/s/Documents/EduBvPmw8LFEiKQbgROHLjcBLREhI27KoXdif7Xf6-MVXg?e=SDdZ8x">DOWNLOAD ARTIST CV</a></li></ul><a href="https://marianeibrahim.com/usr/documents/exhibitions/press_release_url/77/pr_excerpted-text_mf.docx">DOWNLOAD PRESS RELEASE</a>&nbsp;Image: Miranda Forrester, The Palazzo, 2023. Photo by Lucy Dawkins. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim. &nbsp;

Miranda Forrester: Interiorities

Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to announce a group exhibition curated by Jérôme Sans, <a href="https://marianeibrahim.com/exhibitions/72-almost-here-almost-there-almost-home-curated-by-jerome-sans/overview/">"Almost here, Almost there, Almost home"</a> presenting work by Joël Andrianomearisoa, Alexandre Gourçon, Mwangi Hutter, and Tony Lewis, whose vocabularies converge on a minimalist aesthetic to explore complex emotions.With an economy of means and color, the artists reflect upon the nature of dualities and emotion as they search for alignment amongst opposition. As the ever-evolving conversations on identity politics lead us to question the truth, use and confines of labels, these works call into question the relevance of categorizing, alluding to humanity’s innate tendency to divide and classify in order to make sense of the world.From realism to abstraction, the artists explore the poetry of duality, whether it be through entangling bodies that search for unison within contradictions, the layering of material, or the meticulous two-fold treatment of textiles. Rubbing graphite, obsessively folding and refolding, dripping or smudging paint: each artist holds an intimate, almost ritualistic process with their material, that echoes a quest to blur certainties and distort clear distinctions. Exploring the complexity of the world through modest means, the works find poetry within abstraction and absence. In the cracks of the folds, in the empty spaces of the page, lie an ode to simplicity, to ambiguous layers of meaning and interpretations. Exceptionally brought together for the first time in this show, whose title is drawn from one of Joël Andrianomearisoa’s works, these four artists praise moments of silent intimacy and finding meaning, and emotion, in what lies within the interstices.Best known for his monumental installations and his investigation of the materiality of sentiments,&nbsp;Joël Andrianomearisoa&nbsp;(b. 1977, Madagascar) reintroduces poetic space, and emotions into an aesthetic that had hitherto abdicated the individual, gesture, and voice in favor of a smooth, minimal rendering. Putting two opposing traditions back-to-back, he deftly blends the sentimentality of the digital age with the great, cold, frozen-in-time aesthetic of minimalism, asserting the need to reinject poetic language into contemporary artistic practices.Like a landscape, a musical score, or a notebook on which writing drips and overturns meaning, his three textile works&nbsp;Geometry and tales of our desiresplay with an ambiguity between rigidity and liquidity, presence and absence. A series of 10 of his eponymous drawings accompany these works, like sketches, echoes of the roughly drawn, almost dancing, black lines.&nbsp;Terrain de tous les possible&nbsp;showcases his emblematic black vocabulary, while demonstrating another use of textile which focuses on cuts, folds and the suggestiveness of materiality to convey sentimental meanings.&nbsp;Comprised of 200 Beldi glasses and 30 ceramic plates which each hold a unique drawing by the artist,&nbsp;Almost Here, Almost There, Almost Home&nbsp;is produced in Morocco, underlining local production that blends art and craft. Combining textile, paper, glass and ceramics, all characteristic elements of the artist’s language, the works reveal a world of vibrations and ambiguities, both sensitive and poetic.Alexandre Gourçon&nbsp;(b. 1993, Paris) manipulates canvas and textile to create entirely new scenarios with folds, textures, and shadows. In the manner of the costume designer Madame Grès, his work is based on the act of folding, refolding, draping, stretching and sewing, as he merges meticulous, artisanal work with a minimalist aesthetic. Using pale often monochrome colors, he explores the potential of materiality to translate and extract fragments of emotion.For this exhibition, the artist presents two canvases&nbsp;La Voix Silencieuse&nbsp;and&nbsp;La Danse Immobile,&nbsp;neatly split in two parts, making textures and volumes.&nbsp;These works play with dualisms, inciting to reflect upon the binaries that make up life: fullness and void, light and obscurity, happiness and pain. These opposites and contradictions lie at the heart of his extremely intimate, sensitive works, while he provides no answers but suggests meaning through folds that vibrate like sensual, visceral entities. In the manner of a skin, his fragile canvases are like visual poetry in which each wrinkle, each fold silently counts intimate stories.Mwangi Hutter&nbsp;(Ingrid Mwangi, b. 1975, Kenya; Robert Hutter, b. 1964, Germany) fused their names in 2005 to become one single artistic identity, incorporating their respective gender and racial differences. Through a variety of media, Mwangi Hutter challenges traditional notions of identity, revisiting and calling into question collective biases. Often using and documenting their own bodies as theatres of intimacy, pain, and personal introspection intended for collective exorcism, they seek to translate changing societal realities, reflecting upon the construction of identities today and notions of belonging.Works on paper from Mwangi Hutter’s&nbsp;Union series&nbsp;epitomize their use of the body to investigate the intricacies of intimacy and love. Entangling, opposing silhouettes appear in a quest to merge, to become one while roughly defined, blurry outlines and dripping watercolors seem to blend into the page. Playing with a dualistic black and white vocabulary, these works are poetic explorations of balances, equilibriums in love, of the complex negotiation of differences in romantic relationships, and of a search for fusion within intimate embraces.Exploring social topics such as race, power, communication, and labor,&nbsp;Tony Lewis&nbsp;(b. 1986, Los Angeles) integrates poetry and text within a vocabulary of abstraction. By erasing, editing, and assembling words extracted from their source, from literary or popular references such as comic books, he plays with language as a material. Often using black and white, he turns to the medium of graphite for its potential to be stretched, smudged, rubbed and folded across a variety of handmade and found surfaces. From the personal to the political, playing with layers of material and of meaning, he explores what remains unsaid and concealed, to create new, unexpected abstract narratives.For this show, Tony Lewis presents a site-specific installation comprised of floor drawings that stands as a sculpture in the room. Like a cloaked body, his enigmatic work hints at what remains hidden, playing with folds and the intricate handling of paper and graphite to produce ambiguous meanings. Situated at the border between drawing, sculpture and installation, this work appears like a living, organic entity that plays with oppositions, oscillating between rigidity and softness, strength and fragility, presence and absence.Jérôme Sans&nbsp;is a curator, cultural agitator, and director of institutions, known internationally for his pioneering and transversal approach to new models of cultural institutions and exhibitions. He is the co-founder of the acclaimed Palais de Tokyo in Paris and was the director of the ground-breaking Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (UCCA). Since 2022, he has been Artistic Director of LagoAlgo, located in the heart of the Chapultepec Forest in Mexico City. He has curated numerous major exhibitions around the world, including the Taipei Biennale (2000), the Lyon Biennale (2005), Erwin Wurm at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (2022) and Noor Riyadh (2023).

Almost here, Almost there, Almost home: Joël Andrianomearisoa, Alexandre Gourçon, Mwangi Hutter, and Tony Lewis

Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to present the gallery’s second solo exhibition with No Martins entitled, <a href="https://marianeibrahim.com/exhibitions/69-no-martins-encontros-politicos-political-encounters-part-2/overview/">Encontros Políticos (Political Encounters)…Part 2.</a> The exhibition will be on view from September 15 through October 28, 2023.&nbsp;A trip to the beach is one of life's simplest and most pleasurable experiences. But to whom is this pleasure given? For whom is it forbidden? While Brazil, unlike the United States, never had laws sanctioning racism and segregation, these practices were and are standard, customary, and enforced against Brazil’s Black population. Going to the beach as a Black Brazilian brings to bare the question of personhood and, by extension, Black Brazilians’ right to be self-possessed in public.Brazilian beaches as the site of these kinds of encounters recalls the tragic history of the enslavement of Africans and their descendants. Africans first arrived in Brazil, having crossed the Atlantic by boat, as early as the mid 1500s. Rio de Janeiro, home to some of Brazil’s most beautiful and elite beaches, was a major slave port. So was Salvador in the northeastern state of Bahia. Brazilian slavery ended only in 1888, leaving repercussions and legacies that still unduly influence Black Brazilian life. One can not help but to consider the policing of Black Brazilian bodies on Brazilian beaches in the 21st century as a continuation of the trading in Black bodies and the servitude forced upon Black bodies by the Portuguese and ruling white Brazilian elite. Time has certainly moved forward but the dial has not turned sufficiently towards racial democracy.No Martins’ newest body of work confronts Brazil’s aspirational thesis of racial democracy. Through a series of nine large scale canvases, Martins depicts dark skinned Black people of varying genders, body types, friend groups, and familial dynamics in varying states of repose and interaction. Their gaze is turned towards each other, the ocean, or whatever thing they’re focused on - but never towards the viewer. Intentionally, Martins’ figures have no concern for anyone but themselves and the experience of sun, salt, and sea. In this manner, Martins gifts the Black people in his paintings an agency that is not recognized by the broader Brazilian society.&nbsp;In the work Continuidade (2023), two young children play in the sand just inches away from their grandparents’ feet. The grandparents are keeping a watchful eye of their grandchildren while standing in front of a vendor selling beach toys. Attached to the vendor’s cart is a Brazilian flag.&nbsp;The actual Brazilian flag is imprinted with the phrase “Ordem e Progresso”, in English, “Order and Progress”. The notion of order implies, at a minimum, state sanctioned actions that allow order to be maintained. It also implies that the state can decide to enact and enforce order however and whenever it sees fit. Brazil’s twenty-one year military dictatorship affirms this notion. The ongoing stigmatization put upon residents of Brazil’s favelas and enforced, in the name of law and order, by police action in those communities, affirms this notion. The most recent government led by military trained, political conservative, President João Bolsonaro, most certainly affirms this notion.&nbsp;Martins’ Brazilian flag is imprinted with the Portuguese phrase “Progresso é liberdade ao povo”, translated in English as “Progress is freedom for the people.” Here Martins suggests that with liberation comes the potential for the relaxation of vigilance and subsequently, the possibility of actual joy and rest for Black Brazilians. In choosing freedom, Black Brazilians would cease being politicized subjects of a system seeks their demise. Their humanity would not be at stake.Another work, Vendedores (2023), depicts five beach vendors, with their wares surrounding them, taking a break, and talking amongst themselves. In the background, three young women have entered the Atlantic Ocean. In a country like Brazil, where economic disparity is significant and ongoing, the most vulnerable of Brazilian society (who are often, though not exclusively Black Brazilians) have few viable, legal work options so they take on roles in the informal economy, such as the individuals Martins depicts in this work.Martins’ work questions head on the validity and the fragility of racial democracy in Brazil as evidenced by the day to day lives of Black Brazilians. By depicting Black Brazilian leisure on the beach - a key symbol of Brazilian cultural heritage - Martins confronts fundamentally racist and classist beliefs held by a society intent on performing Black subjugation. By affirming Black Brazilians’ right to pleasure and rest, Martins disturbs the notion of racial democracy, and affirms that a country who believes in order as key to progress, and in the name of order and progress, suppresses liberation, can not and will not support and uplift Black Brazilian humanity. Only by inverting the promise of the nation state - and making freedom the desired outcome (rather than progress) - will Black Brazilians have the possibility to claim, occupy, and negotiate their humanity. Key in this negotiation, of course, is the choice of when, where, and how to rest. However, the converse may also be true: neither will Brazilian society be able to rest, until Black Brazilians are considered as and able to be whole humans.&nbsp;Excerpt from a piece written on behalf of the exhibition enetitled, Política da praia, Política do povo &nbsp;/ Beach Politics, People Politics, by curator and writer Negarra A. Kudumu.&nbsp;

No Martins: Encontros Políticos (Political Encounters)…Part 2

TERRA RECOGNITA: A CERAMIC STORYGROUP EXHIBITION15 JULY - 26 AUGUST 2023<a href="https://marianeibrahim.com/contact/">CHICAGO</a><figure class="image"><img src="https://artlogic-res.cloudinary.com/w_1400,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto/ws-marianeibrahimgallery/usr/images/exhibitions/group_images_override/67/ls-009-image.jpg" alt="Terra Recognita: A Ceramic Story, Group Exhibition"></figure>&nbsp;Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to announce its first exhibition dedicated to ceramics: “Terra Recognita: A Ceramic Story.” The show features new works by Nadira Husain, Zizipho Poswa, Jennifer Rochlin, Leena Similu, and Shafei Xia and is on view in Chicago from July 15 – August 26, 2023.&nbsp;Ceramics—despite being one of the world’s oldest art forms—have been discovered and rediscovered time and time again and with the work of these five artists, the medium is once again being challenged in both form and function. Terra cognita refers to the idea of exploring charted territories and discovering new lands. The exhibition displays a broad stroke of diverse cultures and ceramic practices through the works of the exhibiting artists. As vessels, each of the works’ complexities of the present, past, and future highlight the artists and their individual cultures.&nbsp;&nbsp;This body of work boasts large, hand-coiled sculptures, reflective pieces, and painted works. The vessels incorporate symbols and stories, representing the artists’ Individual histories in all their forms. The works of these artists are their means of storytelling, exploring themes of cultural identity and appropriation through the lenses of race, gender, and personal identity.&nbsp;Powsa and Similu view their works as extensions of themselves, blurring the lines between current and former realities in a tangible artistic practice. Poswa’s large hand-coiled works are a testament to African womanhood, inspired by her Xhosa background and paying tribute to the concept of “umthalwo.” Similu’ssculptures, additionally were born out of her experience of becoming a mother, reflecting on her West African origins, ancestors, and her introduction of synthetic hair in pieces reflected on her earliest memories of reconciling with her sense of self and the predicament of where to associate. Thereconciliation of her African heritage with an upbringing in a European-dominated society inspired an interest in cultural identifiers and an exploration of her Mother’s Cameroon lineage and culture that her child would inherit.&nbsp;&nbsp;Meanwhile, Husain’s hybrid paintings integrate symbols and stories from different cultural contexts, merging anthropomorphic beings from furry fandoms, with Indian miniature painting references, immersed in an organic, Libidinal, vegetal universe. Rochlin’s work moreover; displays California’s lush flora and fauna, often referencing pop culture, personal narratives, and art history. Xia’s works are emanations of the artist’s feelings of love, desire, jealousy, and violence. In an inherently human artistic practice, represented explicitly or symbolically, depending on the case, as an omnipresent feature of the work of Shafei. The artist often represents herself as a tiger, a symbol of power and instinctive force, which in Chinese alchemy indicates the active principle, of energy as opposed to the passive principle.&nbsp;&nbsp;These women form carriers of their stories and lives, expressing to the world an undying loyalty to themselves and their desires.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;

Terra Recognita: A Ceramic Story – Group Exhibition

<a href="https://marianeibrahim.com/artists/69-carmen-neely/biography/">Carmen Neely</a> (b. 1987 in Charlotte, North Carolina; lives and works in Chicago) trades in semantics. For Neely, the difference between two types of line is not so much a precious commitment to formal queries that lead nowhere outside of the canvas; rather these marks are an earnest stab at solving real problems in expressing one’s own history and the histories that are passed through us by the act of mark making.&nbsp;&nbsp;Neely’s canvases are surfaces taught with conflict, line, color and language. The marks ricochet and collide off one another, their meanings always affected by their proximity to other gestures. In Neely’s paintings, memory, speech, and feeling are not necessarily linear or discrete expressions and experiences but are rather codependent on a series of contexts that produce, interrupt and re-form them over time.&nbsp;Her paintings give a feeling of catharsis, bursting with colorful and calligraphic strokes on delicate and soft backgrounds. The tableaus propose the peace that comes through an ongoing process of renegotiation and reiteration. If each line holds expressions of identity, values, and memory passed through generations of family and friendships, Neely’s consistent modulation of gesture and color in her own vernacular suggest the mutability and evolution of these values over time and geography. The process is about intricacies of interpretation with the resulting works expressing a methodological approach to language that remainsvulnerable to Neely’s own ongoing confrontation with selfhood.&nbsp;

Carmen Neely, sometimes a painting is a prayer

“There is so much beauty that fills voids. I look right into my own personal family history. Pride is found in knowing who you are.”Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to announce 50 lbs., the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Haitian American painter Patrick Eugène.&nbsp;“50 pounds” is a common weight restriction airline companies enforce on travelers. But what if you had to carry your entire life with you? With just fifty pounds of luggage, is one meant to summon up and journey with the entirety of their life?Patrick Eugène’s paintings are tributes, ones formed not from reference photographs, but from a natural likeness and resemblance to his ancestry. The paintings persist and evoke dignity, refinement, and optimism. Clothing is thrown into bags in fury and with urgency. The figures' expressions are full of hope, worry, and slight anticipation. Through portraits of subjects on the outset of a journey, both physical and mental, Eugène emphasizes the radical effect migration can have on countries and people, even uninvolved.Haiti is the perfect archetype of Pan-Africanism, and a powerful example of how alliance to a larger diasporic community can enable a sense of freedom and kinship. It is the land of one of the most successful revolutions against oppression in human history, and has not only inspired others, but the nation has lent its soldiers and strategic expertise to foreign anti-colonial movements of liberation for over 200 years. In recent decades, the nation of Haiti has been troubled with economic, socio, and geopolitical tensions, which has resulted in the further displacement of people, but not memory or pride. 50 lbs., is a testament to Eugène’s personal understanding of migration and the effect it has had on his perceptions of Usonianism.&nbsp;In the works, viewers are transported through time, each indicating to instances – a man sitting on his luggage, observing his surroundings in fascination; a group of strangers, despite being in an unfamiliar place, all experiencing a sense of belonging, united against common adversity. Many of the works also pay homage to the strength and grace of the females in his family. Pearls symbolize their enduring class, even in hard times and luscious plants embellish the compositions, his grandmas love for gardening creating an everlasting connection with those he cherishes most dearly.50 lbs. also unveils Eugène's first media installations, establishing an immersive atmosphere and evoking the environment of the 1960s–70s migration, ultimately bringing unprecedented insight into some of life's toughest decisions made from necessity. Two installations are presented: one consisting of various pieces of luggage, items pouring out small symbols, and the other containing mementos symbolic to a Haitian immigrant, such as rosary beads, dolls, and letters.The exhibition will be accompanied by a collaboration with D-Composed, a Chicago based Black chamber music collective, who will present the works of Haitian and African American composers.The exhibition text was inspired from “Matriarchal Muses, Haitian Migration, and the American Dream”: An Interview with Visual Artist, Patrick Eugene and curator, Lauren Tate Baeza. Direct excerpts are included.&nbsp;About D-Composed:Started in 2017 by Kori Coleman and yelley taylor and led by their mission to uplift and empower society through the music of Black composers, this Chicago-based creative incubator acts as a bridge between the past and present to the future of representation, music-centered experiences, and the communal power of Black composers and their impact. As the only all-Black ensemble and the only ensemble that focuses exclusively on the works of Black composers in Chicago, D-Composed partners with institutions with a proven commitment to communities of color.

Patrick Eugéne: 50 LBS

Hauntology: Ghostly Matters&nbsp;Group exhibition. Curated by Aindrea Emelife&nbsp;27 JANUARY - 1 APRIL 2023&nbsp;Exhibiting Artists: Okiki Akinfe ruby onyinyechi amanze M. Florine Démosthène Miranda Forrester Taiye Idahor Shannon T. Lewis Olukemi Lijadu Temitayo Ogunbiyi&nbsp;“Black experience in any modern city or town in the Americas is a haunting. One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes.”&nbsp;&nbsp;- DIONNE BRAND, A Map to the Door of No Return&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to announce Hauntology: Ghostly Matters, a group exhibition curated by Nigerian-British curator, Aindrea Emelife. The show is on view in Chicago from January 27 - April 1, 2023, featuring work by OkikioluwaAkinfe, ruby onyinyechi amanze, M. Florine Démosthène, Miranda Forrester, Taiye Idahor, Shannon T. Lewis, Olukemi Lijadu and Temitayo Ogunbiyi.&nbsp;Coined by Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Specters of Marx, Hauntology is used to describe a sense in which contemporary culture is quite literally haunted by the “lost futures” of modernity. Emelife positions this perspective alongside the African concept of Ubuntu, in which our sense of self is shaped by our relationships with others, creating a way of living that begins with the translation and resulting premise, “I am” only because “we are." With this, the exhibition explores the ideas of Black womanhood - the soul, the body, the mind - and seeks to find healing and restoration, promoting oneness rather than fragmentation by uniting the many perspectives of female artists from Africa and the diaspora.&nbsp;&nbsp;The work of Olukemi Lijadu emphasizes the concept of African anthropology and how that relates to personhood and the body in a holistic sense. One of the crossover themes explores how Black womanhood is also embedded in an intricate network of relationships with family (living and dead), the community, God and nature. This view is the antithesis of Greek and the later Cartesian view with its dualistic split between body and soul. The film explores the artist’s relationship with religion, informed by her grandmother, a study of African philosophy, and her Catholic upbringing which come together to represent the fragments of her identity.&nbsp;Avery F. Gordon’s book Ghostly Matters talks about the haunting of history peeking through, in which she writes, “haunting is not the same as being exploited, traumatized, or oppressed, although it usually involves these experiences or is produced by them.” Instead, Gordon argues, haunting is a kind of “animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known.”&nbsp;&nbsp;The past and the present are not discrete categories, like dead and alive, planes on top of planes. Collage speaks to this construction, as embodied by Shannon T. Lewis whose assemblage painting style fragments the form to whimsical effect, but it is in the pursuit of freedom; freedom from stereotype, archetype and marginalization. They are free in their multiplicity, as are Okikioluwa Akinfe’s bodies, which retreat and confront from within blurred lines between figuration and abstraction. With lyrical fluidity, Akinfe interrogates social body language and how race and cultural upbringing enhances or weakens archetypes applied to Black women.&nbsp;&nbsp;Temitayo Ogunbiyi envisions how parts of the body, her own and other bodies of color, can come together to create new compositions that consider community, environment, interdependence, and spirituality. Looking principally to forms found in nature, and how they can be emulated by human gestures such as hairstyling, the work brings together tradition and nature. Inspired by Yoruba adages, the work imbues the idea that every living being has a spirit.&nbsp;Similarly, Taiye Idahor’s focus on hair as a motif symbolizes ancestral connections, family, lineage and history. Unraveling the complexities of identity, her work employs a surrealistic style embedded with symbols that reflecttradition and memory.&nbsp;&nbsp;M. Florine Démosthène exists between dream and nightmare, possibility and actually, as she explores the Black female body as a myriad of collective experiences beyond immediate interpretations based on sensuality. Whereas Miranda Forrester’s exploration of the queer Black female gaze also serves to address the invisibility of women of color in art history.&nbsp;&nbsp;The show also nods to Toni Morrison’s Sula, which imagines Black women dreaming as one, imagining possible and impossible futures. ruby onyinyechi amanze forms a world that imagines boundless futures for Black women. Celebrating the oneness of ubuntu, the weightlessness of the work negotiates away from the heaviness of linear time, understanding the contemporary mythologies and the futuristic feeling of now.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Positioned squarely in a fixed liminality, the show explores spaces of hybridity that Black women exist in. As Black women, we are haunted by expectations, historical and cultural stereotypes, that are fixed principally on our bodies and how they exist and have existed in the world. These artists create as protection, to explore and create the possibilities of the future and new memories of the past. It is survival. Haunting is not negative, it is a profound invention.” - Aindrea Emelife &nbsp; &nbsp;

Hauntology: Ghostly Matters 

Opening | Saturday, November 2, 2019&nbsp;Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to announce Florine Démosthène’s first solo exhibition with the gallery,“Between Possibility and Actuality.” On view from November 2 - December 21, 2019, the show celebrates the second presentation at the gallery’s Chicago space. Démosthène lures you into a phantasmagoric sphere with her sparkly surfaces and her amphibious marble-like figures adorned with aquatic accents.&nbsp;Démosthène’s contemporary take on the body, in the form of multi-media paintings and collage, represent otherworldly dystopian characteristics, furthering the artists’ study of our divine spirit. Démosthène’s heroines criticize beauty canons through the narrative of her self-made feminine heros. In this new body of work, the artist questions, “How do we connect to our inner essence? How do we connect to our ‘self,’ while disconnecting from stories and religions we have been taught?”The duality of her figures consider stereotypical and two-dimensional notions of the black female body. The artist presents her adulation for duplicates by portraying her own body, often duplicated. The existence of twins has provoked curiosity and veneration amongst numerous societies, particularly in West African and Haitian sacred cultures.&nbsp;Démosthène’s art is comprehensively performative, emphasizing flesh and form among an evanescent backdrop. The use of mylar, inherent to her former architectural training, enhance the lack of permanence in the background suggesting the figures are floating and translucent. Between reverie and reality, dream and nightmare, possibility and actuality, Démosthène plunges the viewer into her intertwined almost science-fiction dimension.&nbsp;Image: Florine Démosthène&nbsp;

Florine Démosthène: Between Possibility and Actuality

<html><head></head><body>Opening | Friday, September 20, 2019 | 6–8 PMTake Me to the Water&nbsp;presents a holistic survey of Jackson’s work to date, a culmination of varied discursive elements present in Jackson’s more than a decade long career. These portraits and movement studies offer a sense of the breadth of her practice, while at the same time taking her into new territories with regard to the range of her performances.Jackson has used the archival impulse to assess the impact of the colonial gaze on the history of photography and its relationship to ideas about the body. She uses her lens to deconstruct 19th and early 20th century portraiture&nbsp; as a means for questioning photography’s role in constructing identities. Her thesis is further complicated by the presence of the artist’s figure. She uses her own body to perform the characters with whom she concerns herself.Jackson's images have a compelling complexity: They are richly laced historical allusions, reappropriations of past moments and maps of the ethical considerations involved in the relationship between photographer, subject and viewer.While&nbsp;Take Me to the Water is consistent with the artists ongoing&nbsp;“memory work,”&nbsp;it is a striking departure from her commitment to lived histories as she has chosen to embrace the magical worlds of speculative fiction. Her new characters inhabit an aquatopia populated by aquahumanoids whose attributes are inspired by African and African Diasporic water spirits. From Olokun to Mame Coumba bang, from Kianda to Drexciya, from Yenanja to Mamiwata, Jackson is interested in&nbsp;“the mythic worlds we have studied,” yet emphasizes that she is,&nbsp;“more concerned with those we have been taught to forget.”<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721419480/m6e3b42bb2btwf0wjidg.gif"><figcaption>Ayana V. Jackson, Sea Lion, 2019</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;Top image: Ayana V. Jackson, Double Goddess ... A Sighting in the Abyss, 2019</body></html>

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