Beautifully staged photographs of Nengudi’s Spirit Flags strung in outdoor and indoorlocations, shot in 1972, will be on view alongside a selection of sculptural _Spirit Flags_recreated by the artist for the first time in four decades. A new photographic triptych,depicting the artist’s late husband, will round out the exhibition and its themes of spirit,family, transience and transcendence.

Nengudi’s time in New York, from 1971 to 1974, though brief compared to her years inLos Angeles and later Colorado, was immensely formative for the artist. Living uptownin Spanish Harlem, she quickly joined a network of Black artists and thinkers eager toincorporate elements of Black life and identity into their work, whether it be throughthe body, history or culture. Using a vocabulary rooted in abstraction, Nengudi drewfrom her experience seeing everyday people on the streets of New York, includingthose living on the street, often hunched over, their bodies swaying but nevercollapsing. She translated these impressions into two-dimensional forms made of flagmaterial, with grommets inserted around the edge of each figure. Using nylon cord,Nengudi suspended them so they might ‘begin to talk and move about’ in the wind—as she described in a fellowship statement at the time—and then photographed themin situ. She added: ‘Spirits is the subject I am working with. The inner souls or spirits ofpeople I have seen on the city streets; particularly in Harlem.’

Spirituality—as translated through physical forms, such as the body and materials,both natural and manmade—has been a key notion in Nengudi’s work since the startof her career. Moreover, the Spirit Flags’ use of tension and suspension echoes many of the elements the artist would develop in her R.S.V.P. works, for which she stretchednylon stockings often from one wall to another in ways that call to mind limbs andsinews. In the photographs of Nengudi’s husband, taken in the late 1990s, we see hisbody at rest in a bath, his long locks floating and encircling his body like tentacles ofspiritual energy. Moving and intimate, these images tap into Nengudi’s practice ofhighlighting simple gestures, performed over the backdrop of daily life and capturedphotographically.

The exhibition at Sprüth Magers follows both the artist’s inclusion in the Museum ofModern Art’s recent Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces, celebrating the influentialNew York gallery where Nengudi exhibited her work in the mid-1970s, as well as amajor solo exhibition of Nengudi’s work at Dia:Beacon, New York, on view beginningFebruary 17, 2023.

Winner of the Nasher Prize for Sculpture 2023, Senga Nengudi (*1943, Chicago) livesin Colorado Springs, Colorado. Recent solo exhibitions include Dia: Beacon, Beacon,NY (2023), Philadelphia Museum of Art (2021), Denver Art Museum (2020), Museo deArte de São Paulo (2020), Lenbachhaus, Munich (2019), Henry Moore Institute, Leeds(2018), Baltimore Museum of Art (2018) and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami(2017). Recent group exhibitions include Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022),Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2022), Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich(2021), Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2021), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2020),Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2018), National Gallery of Art, Washington,DC (2018), Brooklyn Museum, New York (2017) and the 2017 Venice Biennale.