BRUSSELS.- Today, Ballon Rouge in Brussels is opening a solo show with new works by Rashawn Griffin (born 1980, Los Angeles). Décors is the American artist's first solo exhibition in Belgium. Griffin has shown extensively at institutions and galleries throughout the United States and Europe since 2005, notably in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY. He was the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant Award in 2007.

Griffin is known for his large-scale installations, sculptures, and paintings which use domestic and everyday materials. The works in Décors have a self-referential aspect, with nods to past works. The colored clay pieces in this exhibition are “paintings” of previous works in which he “painted” with fabrics, for example. The works are small worlds or windows. They are paintings as much as they are sculptures as much as they are installations as much as they are stories—personal and all-embracing in the same way that the decoration of someone’s living room could be indicative of who they are. For him, a painting is a structure, and a wall is soft. Griffin’s work doesn’t fit comfortably into any art historical category and is difficult to define; he has synthesized aspects of both painting and sculpture into a unique approach to art making. With materials ranging from fabric and tassels to paint and cookies, his practice creates poetic relationships between objects, architecture, and painting. He builds fictions.




From the hand-pressed clay panels to a small gesture that would make a ball of clay, or the sculptural and painted amalgamations, there is a subtle and complex relationship this work has to the body. Plans for this exhibition began just before Griffin broke his leg. Since the age of 18, he has had vitiligo, and as a response to trauma like this, his pigment can shift seemingly overnight. This sense of dislocation with one’s own body, a body in space, and specifically the removal of the body as a figurative presence, has always been central to Griffin’s practice. Architectural structures, rooms made of clothing, drawings with internal ruminations, food, blankets, ephemera from performances, and the debris of a lived life have been utilized in his work. He implies the presence of a body, but rarely uses images of one. He assembles the materials used to represent or paint a body, and these objects are then incorporated into the painting, establishing a visual language. ​

One of the works in Décors titled “Portrait of William E. Jones” is of an artist and friend who mailed the items in his portrait to Griffin. The materials used to “represent” or “paint” a body are collected, given to, found, remembered, and gathered by Griffin. The smaller, more intimate scale of the individual works in this solo exhibition suggests bodies, or rather, portraits—sometimes of himself, sometimes of loved ones, sometimes of a conglomeration of nameless people.

Rashawn Griffin
​Décors
​January 12 – March 11, 2022
​Ballon Rouge
​Place du Jardin aux Fleurs, 2
​Brussels 1000 Belgium