joseph scissorhands: Titus Kaphar - New Alters: Reworking Devotion

Titus Kaphar - The Eye of Providence, 2022 (detail)

"What, asks Kaphar, might it mean to produce a contemporary devotional structure within a secular art world-especially in the context of a European art historical tradition dominated by religious imagery and architecture-and what parallels might be drawn between artistic and spiritual practices?" - Gagosian.

To Gagosian Grosvener Hill to catch the first London exhibition of artist Titus Kaphar, and what a good exhibition it is with paintings and sculptures full of spectacle. The paintings are multilayered with cutout surfaces revealing contradictory elements that reveal shifts in time which add a certain tension to these pictures that reckon with both art and America's problematical histories. Crumpled canvases spill from frames and painted surfaces adding a very sculptural dimension to these assemblages. With others there are the addition of smaller figures attached to the edge of the canvases which reference and appear to have been taken from the 19th Century rural paintings of French realist artists such as Jean-François Millet and Gustave Courbet. Other Kaphar works here appear to reference the religious paintings of the Renaissance but have the added interventions of portraits of black men or women obscurring the faces of the white figures along with reproductions of American Civil War and slavery era photography. The unusual shapes of the canvases and use of gold leaf does suggest altarpieces or devotional objects, whilst Kaphar's juxtapositioning of imagery suggests events and injustices in history that need to be healed/prayed for, for a sense of absolution. The resulting artworks are surreal and very dramatic with a strong sense of theatre creating interesting narratives. Equally interesting are both Kaphar figurative sculptures which come shrouded in painted canvases executed in painterly techniques and imagery evocative of previous eras in art history and embellished with gold leaf. There are the presence of pews dotted around the exhibition space to reinforce the religious/devotional aspect of Kaphar's imagery in this series of works. Kaphar has forged a powerful visual language based on art and events rooted in history. I had only experienced Kaphar's work online previously, so this was a great opportunity to experience these complex, theatrical compositions in the physical. And they do need to be experienced firsthand as there is much about them that gets lost in viewing online not least their scale. I look forward to discovering more of the artists work at Gagosian.