New Image Portrait

On 24th of April 2019 Stems Gallery will open at its Brussels location New Image Portrait, a group show of Nina Chanel Abney, Tomoo Gokita, En Imawura, Erik Parker, Koichi Sato, Bailey Scieszka, Christian Rex van Minnen and Allison Zuckerman. The show is curated by Todd Kramer and features eighteen works of art, paintings and sculptures, fteen produced especially for this occasion.

The title of this exhibition conjures up the charge of images, how they coalesce, link to one another, and when they connect form a composite. Gold leaf, acrylic, spray paint, clay array into new gures. These artists spin their vibrant material into re ections on who and what we desire. The new portrait is transmitted, in ected by the way in which media, entertainment, art history, and social structures shape our perception. As such, many of these artists begin in the tradition of collage, newspaper headlines, front page pictures, social media memes serving as their ground. These artists then employ their singular, loose style to intervene, overlay, add, and frustrate their source material. Somehow the fracture is electric in these works, a coming togheter. The look here is reminiscent of the graphic arts, yet the hand processes this information, innovating, framing, weaving the background into the foreground, altering the format through angles and movement and nesting of omages. These solid works still the digital o, albeit momentarily. Taken togheter, these artists offer a view onto the compley way in which identity at this very moment is always in the process of construction.