Remake/Remodel:Titus Kaphar @ The Gagosian.

I can't say I fully understood Titus Kaphar's New Alters:Reworking Devotion exhibition at the Gagosian on Grosvenor Hill when I visited it this weekend. But I did like it.

 

The Grosvenor Hill Gagosian is a great exhibition space to begin with and whoever had curated the show had laid it out, and lit it, just right - but, obviously, Kaphar's art had to be worthy of the space for it to work.

It certainly was. Similarly to Kehinde Wiley, Kaphar's art is about telling the story of those, primarily those of colour, who have been ignored by, or airbrushed out of, historical art. Like Wiley, Kaphar takes fairly traditional looking paintings and adds black faces to them. Unlike Wiley, Kaphar goes on to warp the art just that little bit further. To what end politically, I'm not certain. To what end artistically, I guess because it makes the work more aesthetically pleasing.

Nothing wrong with that. Quite a lot right with it. There were no titles attached to the paintings, and those sheets of A4 they used to hand out on entry appear to be fading out (pandemic collateral?) so I've not been able to mark up what any of the works are called but I don't think that's necessarily important.

One of things I liked about these Kaphar pieces is the 3D element to some of them. The funny little cut out gatekeepers that stand proudly in front of the paintings as if to teach us about them or the mocked up crumples that give the illusion of an old artwork being pulled down to reveal a new, or perhaps an even older, one in its place.

There's a surreal appeal to some of the work while others rely on creating images of destruction, vandalism even. There are statues, archers, drugstores, horses, and dogs and it all looks rather fantastic and even though I know there are things here being said about race, about race in the art world and how it is presented to us, the public, the gallery goers, I couldn't quite work out what it was.

That didn't mean I left the gallery frustrated. It meant I left the gallery keen to learn more about Titus Kaphar and his work. This was his first solo exhibition in the UK and though it was quite a large one I'd be very eager to attend one at a public, rather than commercial, gallery and to learn more about it all. My appetite was whetted but it was not sated.