Ben Brown Fine Arts Presents Awol Erizku

Ben Brown Fine Arts presents Cosmic Drill, its third solo exhibition of the work of Los Angeles-based artist Awol Erizku, from 27th January-6th April 2023.

The exhibition follows Erizku’s highly acclaimed shows with Ben Brown Fine Arts, 慢慢燃燒 Slow Burn (Hong Kong, 2018) and Make America Great Again (London, 2017). Cosmic Drill will unveil an alluring new body of work that converges the mediums of painting, photography and sculpture, while harnessing myriad influences including street markings, hip-hop music, basketball, dice games, and NASA telescopic data. (Top of page – Awol Erizku, PTSD, 2020)

Cosmic Drill features large-scale mixed media paintings and a seminal marble sculpture, as well as a conceptual mix-tape produced specifically for the exhibition. The paintings are executed upon industrial aluminium surfaces directly emblazoned with photographic imagery that includes pictures of the cosmos captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and exposed parts of photographic film, taken from the 35mm camera Erizku uses to document his daily studio activities. These paintings are influenced by the neighborhood tags – graffiti artist territory-marking ‘signatures’ – seen across Los Angeles on public spaces and exteriors of business establishments. These are often ‘cleaned up’ with mismatched paint or removed with a buffing process, an aesthetic alluded to in the brightly spray-painted sections of these new works. Also included in the exhibition is the totemic sculpture Head Crack (Stack or Starve), comprising three large-scale, stacked dice rendered from Black Absolute granite, Verde Malachite marble and a Red Jasper from Madagascar, making up the colours of the pan-African flag and signifying the ‘game of luck’ that is life.

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Urban

Erizku is distinguished for his unique visual language and distinctive iconography that address issues of race, identity, politics and cultural history, while drawing from references spanning urban culture to the art historical canon. Cosmic Drill presents a conceptually dynamic and visually powerful new body of work, a sublime perpetuation and culmination of the artist’s achievements in photography, painting, sculpture and mixed media.

Awol Erizku - No Hesi, 2022
Awol Erizku – No Hesi, 2022

Awol Erizku

Awol Erizku, born in 1988, currently lives and works between Los Angeles and New York. Erizku received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Cooper Union, NY, and a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT. Erizku’s work has been exhibited at prominent institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto; and FLAG Art Foundation, New York. His photographs of cultural and creative leaders have been featured in the New Yorker, New York, GQ, and Vanity Fair, with a recent exhibition of artworks featured throughout New York City and Chicago for the Public Art Fund.

Instagram: @awolerizku

Ben Brown Fine Arts

In 2004, Ben Brown Fine Arts opened its first location in the heart of Mayfair, London. The gallery quickly established itself on the international art scene with exhibitions of long-term gallery artists Candida Höfer, Tony Bevan, Claude & François-Xavier Lalanne, and Heinz Mack, amongst others, as well as momentous exhibitions of 20th-century masters including Lucio Fontana, Alighiero Boetti and Gerhard Richter. In 2009, Ben Brown Fine Arts opened an exhibition space in Hong Kong, becoming the first international gallery to move to the city that would soon become a major international art hub. In Hong Kong, the gallery introduced notable exhibitions of Pablo Picasso, Sean Scully, Frank Auerbach, and Miquel Barceló, as well as survey exhibitions of Chinese contemporary photography, the Düsseldorf School of Photography, 20th-century Italian art, and the ZERO movement. In 2021, Ben Brown Fine Arts opened a third location in Palm Beach, Florida, with an inaugural exhibition celebrating the legacy of American and European 20th-century artists who developed radical approaches to making art, among them Alexander Calder, Georg Baselitz, and Andy Warhol. The galleries regularly exhibit and develop programming for our renowned stable of international, multi-disciplinarian contemporary artists, including the aforementioned as well as Yoan Capote, Awol Erizku, Nabil Nahas, José Parlá, Enoc Perez, Ena Swansea, Hank Willis Thomas, Gavin Turk, and Jan Worst. With multi-lingual staff based in London, Hong Kong, New York, and Palm Beach, the gallery has strong relationships with private collectors, advisors, and public institutions, sourcing and placing important primary and secondary artworks for them. Ben Brown Fine Arts participates in major art fairs worldwide, including Art Basel, Art Basel Hong Kong, Art Basel Miami Beach, The Armory Show, Frieze Masters, TEFAF Maastricht, and TEFAF New York.

www.benbrownfinearts.com


Awol Erizku - The Recipe (KAR), 2022
Awol Erizku – The Recipe (KAR), 2022

AWOL ERIZKU
COSMIC DRILL
27 January – 6 April 2023
PRIVATE VIEW Thursday 26 January, 6-8PM

Instagram: @benbrownfinearts
Facebook: /BenBrownFineArts
Twitter: @BenBrownFineArt


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