Brenna Youngblood
dal 30/1/2015 al 27/3/2015
Segnalato da
30/1/2015
Brenna Youngblood
Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris
'Stairway'. For the exhibition the artist presents 12 recent paintings which take fragmented elements as the starting point for deepening her reflection on the notion of 'recomposition'. She produces paintings from dissimilar elements and materials, which she assembles on the canvas.
The Galerie Nathalie Obadia is very pleased to present the exhibition Stairway as its second exhibition of the work
of Brenna Youngblood, after Spanning Time in Brussels in 2013. It is the artist’s third solo exhibition in Europe.
Following a very busy decade, the L.A.-based artist Brenna Youngblood has emerged from the post-black generation
as one of the unquestioned rising talents of the Afro-American art scene in California. Although her work was originally
linked to photography and its different manners of presentation (in particular through collage and conceptual
photography), for some years now she has engaged herself in painting and sculpture, producing a body of work that
is resolutely tied to reality while moving in the direction of increasingly manifest and radical instances of abstraction.
Youngblood will present 12 recent paintings (all dated 2014) which take fragmented elements as the starting
point for deepening her reflection on the notion of “recomposition”. She produces paintings from dissimilar
elements and materials, which she assembles on the canvas. To create powerful images, she combines
pieces of paper (bank notes, vinyl paper, sticky paper, imitation wood, wallpaper, personal photographs,
found photographs that she cuts out, photocopies, cardboard letters), objects (fan blades, shoe soles) and
paint (acrylic, aerosol, pigments, stains, dripping, impasto, resin, transparencies, lumps, varnish). Visually
complex and conceptually powerful, Brenna Youngblood’s paintings make use of elements taken from
everyday life. She makes these images and objects disappear beneath thick layers of paint, which she then
scrapes away again to reveal a hidden image, in the same way an archaeologist removes layers of earth.
She takes representational objects and images from the reality around her and renders them abstract, all the while
allowing them to retain their outward appearance from their previous life and primary function. What interests
Youngblood in her compositions is to disrupt what is familiar to us in order to question the diversity of significances
encompassed by images and objects in our everyday world.
The process of construction of each work is complex and not easily divined, but these hybrid and kaleidoscopic
structures – sometimes rendered in low relief – are veritable narratives whose detail begs examination. Brenna
Youngblood’s inspiration for these accounts arises from her private life, her time, her life in Los Angeles, the grids
of city and town streets, local communities and peoples from which she herself comes, those in crisis or difficulty
and with marginal and multicultural identities. She also employs the country’s temporal, geographic, cultural and
folkloric artefacts – typical Americana – to question the given history of the United States.
Brenna Youngblood investigates the formal notions of history and art that she freely employs (Gestural Abstraction,
collages, Color Field in her composite monochrome works, reminiscences of Robert Rauschenberg) in her portraits,
landscapes, still-lifes, interiors and abstractions so as to stimulate emi BRENNA YOUNGBLOOD,STAIRWAY, 2014 / MIXED MEDIA ON CANVAS / 182,88 X 152,4 X 6,03 CM (72 X 60 X 2 3/8 INnently provocative and political questions
regarding issues of identity, colour, class and memory.
Image: Brenna Youngblood, Stairway, 2014 / mixed media on canvas / 182,88 x 152,4 x 6,03 cm
Press Contact
Maimiti Cazalis, maimiti.cazalis@galerie-obadia.com
Opening: Sat Jan 31 5pm
Galerie Nathalie Obadia
3, rue du Cloître St. Merri
Mon - Sat 11am to 7pm