If we don’t amend history by making new images and new representations, we are always going to be excluding ourselves. —Titus Kaphar
Read MorePainter, sculptor, filmmaker, and installation artist Titus Kaphar confronts history by dismantling classical structures and styles of visual representation in Western art in order to subvert them. Dislodging entrenched narratives from their status as 'past' so as to understand and estimate their impact on the present, he exposes the conceptual underpinnings of contested nationalist histories and colonialist legacies and how they have served to manipulate both cultural and personal identity.
Through the deconstructive techniques of cutting, shredding, stitching, binding, and erasing both subject and support, Kaphar reconstructs new codes and modalities, reckoning on Black possibilities. In Yet Another Fight for Remembrance (2014), he used thick white brushstrokes to obscure the gesturing bodies of a group of African American men in the 'Hands up, don’t shoot' position, and then repainted their outlines in black to reassert their formal presence. Thus the painting process itself became the embodiment of the ongoing struggle for social visibility and recognition. During his 2017 TED Talk, Kaphar performed, onstage, the whitewashing of his large-scale painting Shifting the Gaze (2017). Based on Frans Hals’s Family Group in a Landscape (1645–1648), which portrays a wealthy Dutch family and their African servant, Kaphar’s version eclipsed the family group with white paint, shifting attention entirely to the presence of this young servant.
Kaphar’s art addresses salient social and political concerns, but it also springs from his own life story. For example, his encounter with his estranged father, Jerome, has led to an ongoing multimedia exploration of the criminal justice system called The Jerome Project (2014–). This series of portraits began with Kaphar’s online discovery of the mug shots of ninety-seven African American men who shared his father’s first and last names. He paints gilded portraits of each man in the style of Byzantine devotional icons, and then dips them in tar. Initially, the depth to which each painting was immersed in tar corresponded to the time that each subject had spent behind bars; in later paintings, this has increased to represent the longer-term implications of social silencing that results from their incarceration.
In works such as Behind the Myth of Benevolence (2014) and the series 'Seeing Through Time' (2017–), Kaphar instrumentalises the visual strategies and methods of key European classicists such as Diego Velázquez, Jacques-Louis David, and Théodore Géricault to rewrite the narratives of cultural empowerment with Black subjects. And just as historical conditions and contexts prompted artists of the twentieth century to generate radical aesthetic concepts and modes—consider the traumatic inspiration of the Second World War for artists globally, from Pablo Picasso and Albert Burri to Ibrahim El-Salahi and Norman Lewis—so is Kaphar’s subject matter responsive to the self-evident anxieties of present-day America. In his latest series of paintings, From a Tropical Space (2019–), he creates a surreal, emotionally intense landscape that is uniquely his own and firmly rooted in the present, drawing on his exhaustive study of nineteenth-century painting techniques. The saturated, artificial coloration of the suburban environments against which women and the silhouettes of their absent children are set both complicates and adds tension to these charged and enigmatic genre scenes. Coincident with renewed sociopolitical energies and content within the broader practice of figurative painting, Kaphar’s images resonate with the turbulent and uncertain times in which we live.
Key to Kaphar’s representation by Gagosian is the gallery’s substantive support for NXTHVN (Next Haven), a nonprofit arts hub that Kaphar founded with Jason Price and Jonathan Brand in 2015 in the Dixwell neighbourhood of New Haven, Connecticut. Nurturing creative talent within and beyond the local community, NXTHVN offers fellowships, residencies, and other professional development opportunities to artists, curators, and students. Housed in two repurposed factory buildings, it maintains exhibition and performance spaces in addition to studio and co-working facilities.
Text courtesy Gagosian.