LOS ANGELES, CA.- GAVLAK announced the representation of Los Angeles-based artist April Bey. The gallery’s guiding mission of promoting works by women and LGBTQ artists is enhanced and enriched through its amplification of Bey’s vision.
April Bey’s (Bahamian/American) work delivers audacious critiques of the mainstreaming and monetization of radical politics via a diverse range of media. Moving deftly between painting, printmaking, collage, video, intimately scaled artist’s books and immersive installations, Bey wittily skewers pop culture’s sacred cows. Icons and anti-heroes of both American and Bahamian culture populate the bold and bright environs of her compositions, allowing for ambiguity in our assessments of their impact and legacies. Bey’s incorporation of mass-produced objects and reproductive media including printmaking and video underscores the means by which images come to define reality through their incessant replication in a world we experience increasingly through virtual means.
The wax print fabrics manufactured in China but marketed as quintessentially “African” textiles that appear throughout Bey’s work demonstrate the artist’s commitment to charting the trajectories of postcolonial visual culture through her material choices. The sequins, glitter, and neon-hued faux fur that frame the fantastical subjects of the Atlantica series (2018-2020) articulate the queer origins of the denizens of Atlantica, a planet invented by Bey’s Black father as a means of conveying the absurdities of racism and colorism. In keeping with Afrofuturist strategies of short-circuiting traumatic pasts through intrepid reimaginings of reality, Bey’s renderings of the outlandish Atlanticans propose alternate timelines for a Blackness that is not of this world.
Bey’s first solo exhibition with Gavlak Gallery will take place in January 2022 and will coincide with her solo presentation at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Bey’s work resides in the permanent collections of the California African American Museum, Los Angeles; the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, Nassau; and the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, Connecticut. Recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions include presentations for the California African American Museum (2021); UPFOR, Portland, Oregon (2020); Coagula Curatorial, Los Angeles (2017); and Liquid Courage Art Gallery, New Providence, Nassau, the Bahamas. Her work has been featured prominently in notable group exhibitions including Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (2020); the New Orleans African American History Museum (2019); and Brazil House Gallery, Accra, Ghana (2019).
