LOS ANGELES, CA.- albertz benda Los Angeles is presenting, Do You See Me?, a group exhibition bringing together seven artists’ ongoing explorations of identity through their respective mediums of painting, collage, and sculpture. Engaging with figuration to explore their own subjectivities, these artists embrace representation to further social, political, and theoretical dialogues.
Oklahoma-based painter Robert Peterson focuses on capturing the quiet heroism of daily life within Black communities. Peterson paints skin with a striking emphasis on bold color and strong contrasts. The result is a polychromatic, joyous, and exuberant expression of love for Blackness itself.
Similarly entranced by the beauty of Black bodies and the prismatic quality of light, Lanise Howard integrates her female protagonists within fantastical, idyllic nature scenes. Her work examines femininity through the lens of the surreal, borrowing visual cues from sacred geometry and the esoteric.
Natalie Wadlington takes her observations of the elusive connection between humans and the natural world one step further in her symbolic paintings. Flattening and skewing perspectival space, Wadlington places her figures in expansive outdoor scenes rendered with impossibly vivid colors and streamlined geometries that speak to the subject’s state of mind.
"Looking inwards to outwards, drawing on their own lived experiences, the seven artists in Do You See Me? confront us with stylized protagonists that exemplify an idealized version of the communities within which they live.“ shares co-founder, Thorsten Albertz.
Brazilian painter Larissa de Souza’s multi-media acrylic paintings incorporate fabric and embroidery in their reflections on femininity, legacy, and family bonds. Often resembling pages from scrapbooks or framed family photos, these works aim to preserve the artist’s memories on canvas, resisting the historical erasure of the Afro-Brazilian population while also crafting new narratives of what it means to be a Black woman in Brazil.
Collaging his works on paper with found materials such as plastic packaging, Dustin Harewood‘s figurative works add literal dimensionality with their frieze-like structures. With a visual vocabulary that draws from 90s cartoons and contemporary toys, his work skews toward a darker subject matter and explores a range of topical issues from climate change to racial inequality.
Ceramicist Sydnie Jimenez brings the investigation of identity into three-dimensional form with her figurative sculptures of stylish, young people with ambiguous racial backgrounds. Echoing the style of both Mesoamerican pottery and notebook doodles, these works engage with the past while remaining firmly rooted in the present as a challenge to popular culture’s toxic Eurocentric foundation.
Textile artist Angela Anh Nguyen’s meticulously tufted rugs subvert archetypes of American society from a working-class perspective. Her figurative rugs present life-size caricatures drawn from our chaotic modern age that speak to our general state of anxiety with a sense of humor and understanding.
