Gallery MOMO Johannesburg
Kenrick McFarlane | ANIMA
12 October – 18 November 2017
Opening Thursday, 12 October at 18:00
Gallery MOMO is pleased to present Kenrick McFarlane’s first solo exhibition in South Africa, ANIMA.
McFarlane uses painting as a language to express his political and personal thoughts, desires, emotions, and fears. ANIMA is a concept developed by analytical psychologist Carl Jung that refers to an archetype that influences the relationship amongst men and women. It is a kind of innate guide, a personification of the unconscious, which leads one through the ambiguous path of engaging and interacting with the feminine and one’s own body.
McFarlane summons this archetype to guide the spirit of his making, taking form through the visual techniques of Renaissance painting layered with synthetic, and often off-kilter, colored cartooning. His work presents a keen awareness of the historical paucity that surrounds the representation of the black body within the practice of painting. McFarlane uses formal devices excavated from European painting to allude to the unseen black influence within the history of painting.
In this body of new work McFarlane presents us with paintings dominated by landscapes neither here nor there, dislocated stages for histories desires, violence and pleasures, ANIMA exists as a tableaux vivant of the artist own personification of Western history within his body, mind and spirit.
McFarlane had his debut solo show entitled Face Off at the Gene Siskel Film Center followed by the exhibitions The King of Crooks at Morton College and The Tipping Point of Me and We at Little Black Pearl Art and Design Center. In the same year, McFarlane was selected by Kerry James Marshall to participate in an exhibition curated by Dawoud Bey titled Eclectic Coherence held at Expo Chicago, Navy Pier. McFarlane is a graduate from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently pursuing his MFA at the University of Central, Los Angeles.
For all media queries please contact Blake Daniels at: blake@gallerymomo.com | +27 11 327 3247
[calltoaction]
