Nicodim Gallery Presents DISEMBODIED Group Show in New York

DISEMBODIED, curated by Ben Lee Ritchie Handler, builds and continues conversations around the violence, ecstasy, and epiphany within out-out-body experiences as-seen from the perspective of those on the ground—the leaps of faith we take to believe those who say their souls depart while their bodies remain. The works in the exhibition cover a wide swath of allegorical and tangible disembodied states, including the spiritual, the telegraphic, the psychedelic, the dissociative-induced, artificial intelligences, and alien encounters. The exhibition includes works by Jeanine Brito, Joshua Hagler, Ho Jae Kim, Rae Klein, Yoora Lee, Laurens Legiers, Tali Lennox, Jorge Peris, Mosie Romney, Nicola Samori, Krista-Louise Smith, and Nadia Waheed.

DISEMBODIED is on view through March 9 @ Nicodim Gallery 15 Greene Street New York

Devendra Banhart's The Grief I Have Caused You @ Nicodim Gallery In Los Angeles

“Nothing is more gall-bitter than suffering, nothing more honey-sweet than having suffered.” 
— Meister Eckhart

The recursive abstracted forms within Devendra Banhart’s canvases are a non-hierarchical alphabet of allegories for the diminishment and destruction of ego. Each mouth, prick, eye and ass breaks apart and reconstructs itself until they become a collective commune of equally all-important, yet weightless pieces of the tantric universe. They are a cycle of mala beads through the fingers of time.

The Grief I Have Caused You is on view through March 20 @ Nicodim Gallery 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, #160. photographs by Lani Trock

Simphiwe Ndzube Presents Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon @ Nicodim Gallery In Los Angeles

My skin is tightening
soon I shall shed it
like a monitor lizard
like remembered comfort
at the new moon rising
I will eat the last signs of my weakness
remove the scars of old childhood wars
and dare to enter the forest whistling
like a snake that had fed the chameleon
for changes
I shall be forever.
— excerpted from Audre Lorde, “Solstice,” 1978

With Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon, Simphiwe Ndzube continues to develop and expand his cosmology, reimagining Black bodies as mythical and fantastic beings capable of inhabiting multiple dimensions. His figures fly, flail, fall, and dance their way from sculpture, to sound, to canvas through multiple environments, highlighting the fluidity and permeability of identity itself. Like the snake, his characters can be cold-blooded and stealthy; like the chameleon, they are capable of change.

Whereas the bodies in Ndzube’s earlier works are often faceless or headless, this series includes detailed portraits of a number of the individual characters and further develops their unique personalities. In prior exhibitions, Ndzube’s figures reckoned with drought and desolate environments, but the landscapes in Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon have grown fertile and sensual along with the humanoids that populate them. Where once the earth was dry and barren, it has now been sown and is ready for harvest. Within the paintings, pink flowers rise to the sky and spread their fleshy petal-tongues to the sunlight, begging to be kissed. Around them, a sculptural cornfield grows throughout the exhibition. A seven-foot dandy traipses throughout the proceedings, peacocking his vibrant couture to anyone who will pay attention. A Bacon-esque figure in a Garden of Earthly Delights, perhaps he is trying to draw the eyes of the couple making love in the sunlight on a canvas nearby.

Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon is on view through March 20 @ Nicodim Gallery 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, #160. photographs by Lani Trock.

Opening of Robert Yarber's Return Of The Repressed @ Nicodim Gallery In Los Angeles

“What’s returning and why was it repressed?” asks Ben Lee Ritchie Handler of Robert Yarber at the press preview for the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in over twenty years. The double entendres abound and the disarming deconstruction of the artist’s psyche takes a crystal clear focus. The loss of innocence, the loss of control, the liberation therein, the empowerment in being ostracized by a professor, and the lasting impression left by witnessing the assassination of of President John F. Kennedy. The simultaneous flood of immediacy and nostalgia is disorienting and thrilling—his paintings are a cutting visual counterpoint to critical theory, anchored through dramaturgical events and eclipses of subjecthood. Backlit and reflecting a palette at once surreal and familiar, his forms summon those of Tintoretto on an acid trip, or maybe Titian on ecstasy. While his forbearers looked up to the heavens, however, Yarber’s is the iridescent chiaroscuro of nightlife long past the witching hour. Return of the Repressed is on view through October 20 at Nicodim Gallery 571 S Anderson Street Ste 2, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Katherina Olschbaur Presents "Horses" @ Nicodim Gallery Los Angeles

The horse, to Katherina Olschbaur, is a banner of freedom, but also one of constraint. Some of her subjects are galloping unbridled, powering through surreal, fluorescent landscapes as the ground bows, its surface giving willfully to the weight of each hoof. Other equines are restrained, bound to human figures—occasionally draped over human figures—erotically reinterpreting dressage as fetish play, begging the question: who’s riding whom? Horses is on view through August 18 at Nicodim Gallery 571 S Anderson Street Ste 2 Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

The Eye Sees Not Itself Opening @ Nicodim Gallery

The Eye Sees Not Itself arrives from conflicting encounters with the Eurocentric academy, burgeoning metropolitan cultures and spaces, and indigenous histories as forms and concepts, systems and processes, to approach the metaphysical context of artistic practice and production. The exhibition includes works from artists Umar Rashid, Moffat Takadiwa, Charles Dickson, Lavar Munroe, Simphiwe Ndzube and Buhlebezwe Siwani. The Eye Sees Not Itself is on view through June 16 at Nicodim Gallery 571 S Anderson Street Ste 2 Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

BioPerversity Group Show Opens @ Nicodim Gallery In Los Angeles

Nicodim Gallery is pleased to present BioPerversity, an exploration of humanity’s darker and lighter perversions as told through the personification of the rest of the animal kingdom, creatures who exist a few rungs beneath us on the evolutionary ladder. BioPerversity is on view through April 28 at Nicodim Gallery 571 S Anderson Street Ste 2, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Homeward Bound Group Show @ Nicodim Gallery In Los Angeles

Homeward Bound is a domestic setting where all the skeletons are let out of the closet and allowed to play on the furniture, to stomp each other’s grapes. With the eye of noted designer Oliver M. Furth, the gallery space has been transformed into a literal home, complete with a living room, dining room, bedroom, bathroom, beyond. Karon Davis’s Bianca sits plaintively by a front room window, drinking, smoking, waiting for a lover who will never return. Bjarne Melgaard cross-dresses in the skins of other species as if he was never quite comfortable in his own, while Lisa Anne Auerbach is very comfortable lounging around the house, reading bondage magazines in her underwear. Chris Burden’s first wife informs him in a letter that not only won’t she crucify him to their VW Bug, but that the suggestion has destroyed her relationship with the vehicle. Gold-leafed snails carry their mobile homes to the apexes of an organic landscape—the tips of Ruben Verdu’s nose and erect phallus—and both artist and travelers achieve climax simultaneously. Within the walls of this house, faces become chairs, vaginas become toothy faces, jello moulds become temples and orifices, music becomes sex itself. Homeward Bound will be on view until December 9th at Nicodim Gallery, 571 S Anderson Street Ste 2 Los Angeles