Tschabalala Self, the New York artist with a meteoric rise presents her works in Dijon until January 2023.

A meteoric rise

Until January 22, 2023 The Consortium Museum in Dijon presents Make Room, an exhibition by American artist Tschabalala Self. An essentially pictorial exhibition, which highlights black bodies in a semi-abstract way. A highlighting, sometimes sexually explicit, which works around the idea of ​​stereotypes. Tschabalala Self, a young artist with a meteoric rise recognized for her use of sewing, patchwork in her works. The exhibition that Self is displaying in the rooms of the Consortium Museum revolves around a domestic staging of painting and its occupants in their hieraticism, all the more assertive as it expresses itself in force at the front – plane of the purely two-dimensional painted surface. These poses, Father, 2019, Blonde, 2019, Snake, 2020, Dreamers, 2021 (for the male character) have this from the Antique that they use the nude (or partially dressed) male or female model as an affirmation of the characters specific to black bodies.

Black bodies in a semi-abstract way

The works on paper, deliver, and this is their novelty, the figures seated (melted) on chairs with contours highlighted in the manner of wrought iron garden furniture, including at least two rooms, in the course of the exhibition , give them citizenship. This furniture – tables and chairs, benches – had been discovered last year (October 2021) during the Performa festival in New York, for which the artist had designed, written, set design and staged a show – Sounding Board – given at the Jackie Robinson Park Bandshell in Harlem. A film documenting the performance is shown in the mezzanine room. Make Room, the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition diverts, if need be, the pressure she has been under for a few years — success has come — towards mature works where the masculine/feminine relationship is expressed in domestic figures and poses in shadow and light, in full view of all, whatever the intimacy and assumed shamelessness of the painted characters.

Le consortium

37 Rue de Longvic, 21000 Dijon