Dickon Drury Mines Diverse Corners of Still-Life Painting in An Egg in Your Shoe @ Shulamit Nazarian

Installation view of An Egg in Your Shoe. Courtesy of Dickon Drury and Shulamit Nazarian.

Shulamit Nazarian is currently featuring An Egg in Your Shoe, the gallery’s first solo exhibition by UK-based painter Dickon Drury. The artist’s thematically rich, meticulously detailed paintings mine diverse corners of art history and the genre of still-life painting to delve into themes of self-sufficiency, preservation, and regeneration with tenderness and humor.

Drury's latest series of oil paintings on linen invites viewers to contemplate the complex relationship between material possessions and a sense of home amid an uncertain future. The still lives present collections of objects that work like visual puzzles, prodding the viewer to piece together clues about the mysterious inhabitants of these scenes. Drury's practice seeks the humor and idiosyncrasy embodied in our selection of material possessions, and his research has often looked to the supplies collected by apocalypse preppers. Boxes in the process of being packed or unpacked evoke a sense of urgency and an impending move, while rolls of bubble wrap allude to themes of protection and value for one's beloved objects. The compositions present their diverse groupings of objects democratically, without a hierarchical division between a whistle, a lighter, or a high-end ceramic vase. Without a human figure in sight, Drury's paintings offer an imaginative narrative played out in the background by the invisible, implicit inhabitants of his eccentric world.

 
 

An Egg in Your Shoe is on view through October 28 @ Shulamit Nazarian, 616 N La Brea Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90036

Karon Davis: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished @ Jeffrey Deitch In New York

When Karon Davis has not seen a specific image of Black history in art history, she tries to create it herself. For her first solo exhibition in New York, No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, the viewers are witness to one of the most unjust trials in American history. The work celebrates the defiance of Bobby Seale in the face of injustice. Bobby Seale, bound and gagged in a Chicago courtroom, is one of the most searing images in American history. There were no photographs of this shocking episode during the trial of the Chicago 8 in October 1969, only artists’ sketches. This has made the image even more resonant as we conflate the sketches and subsequent actors’ portrayals in our visual memory. The image of Bobby Seale, physically restrained but defiant, refusing to submit to the judge, has haunted Davis for many years. It became especially provocative during the past year’s incidents of police violence.

A powerful sculptural tableau of a bound and gagged Bobby Seale in front of Judge Julius Hoffman and the Chicago jury confronts visitors to the exhibition. Displayed in front of the courtroom are fifty sculpted bags of groceries, juxtaposing the Black Panthers’ free food program for the Black community in Oakland, California, with the repression of the judicial system.

Davis’s title for the exhibition is a reference to the government’s violent prosecution of the Black Panthers and its distortion of the public’s understanding of the Panthers’ contributions to their community.

Karon Davis: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished is on view through April 24 @ Jeffrey Deitch 18 Wooster Street, New York

Zandile Tshabalala's Enter Paradise @ ADA \ contemporary art gallery In Accra

 
 

Zandile Tshabalala’s latest series of paintings, titled Enter Paradise, places the Black female figure at the heart of her sensual dreamscapes, thereby revisiting the representation of the Black woman throughout art history. Marking the artist’s debut solo career, and the gallery’s third consecutive debut solo show since opening in October 2020, the new paintings include a selection of figurative self-portraits in which Tshabalala revisits the representation of the Black female figure.

Enter Paradise is on view through April 18 @ ADA \ contemporary art gallery Villaggio Vista, North Airport Road, Airport Residential Area , Accra, Ghana