Lehmann Maupin returns to The Art Show presented by ADAA with a presentation of new works by gallery artist Nicholas Hlobo that capture his newfound engagement with acrylic paint—a medium that he has not employed since his days as an art student. The gallery’s installation in Booth D22 marks the first time that Hlobo’s work will be featured in New York in more than four years. Hlobo’s use of acrylic builds a new complexity into his signature multi-media canvases, combining historically-specific materials to explore race, gender, and identity–specifically, his identity as a Black, gay man–within the context of his South African heritage.
Best known for his weaving and stitching of metaphorically charged materials, such as colorful ribbon, leather, wood, and copper, Hlobo creates composite objects that are intricate and seductively tactile. In his new paintings, the artist renders semi-anthropomorphic forms through acrylic and ribbon, synthesizing the historically-gendered practices of painting (historically championed by the “male artistic genius”) and craft (historically relegated to the domestic, “feminine” realm), to create amalgamated forms that feel at once familiar, alien, and ancient. In this way, his practice engages themes of self-discovery and invention, uniting craft and fine art materials as a means to resist strict dichotomies and embrace fluid hybridity.
Hlobo’s acrylic and ribbon abstractions seem to move and shift, taking on animalistic or semi-human qualities as though they have come alive. While the creatures in each canvas inhabit their own vivid worlds, Hlobo has woven myriad relationships between them; each piece is connected by color, texture, and movement. In Abafaz'abane (2022), Hlobo loosely identifies his subject with a grouping of four women, while in Umntan'ezulu (2022), he references a mantis-like insect. Both forms unfold alike from dense torsos of paint, spilling their long and textured tendrils throughout their respective canvases. Grounded in thick, expressionist mark making and animated through outward movement and fine linework, Hlobo’s creatures exist somewhere between reality and imagination. In this way, the works lure viewers into a liminal space that both suggests and resists identification, asking them to navigate a new world free of category and hierarchy.
Hlobo received a fine art degree from Johannesburg’s Technikon Witwatersrand in 2002. Solo exhibitions of his work have been organized by the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel; Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; and The Maitland Institute, Cape Town, South Africa, among others. Hlobo has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Tate Modern, London and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. He also participated in the 54th Venice Biennale. His work is held by a number of prominent international public and private collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit; the Tate Modern, London; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.