ART CITIES: London-Dominic Chambers

Dominic Chambers creates vibrant paintings that simultaneously engage art historical models, such as color-field painting and gestural abstraction, and contemporary concerns around race, identity, and the necessity for leisure and reflection. Interested in how art can function as a mode for understanding, recontextualizing, or renegotiating one’s relationship to the world, the artist sees painting as a critical and intellectual endeavor, as much as an aesthetic one.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive

A writer himself, Dominic Chambers draws inspiration from literature, especially Magical Realism and the writing of W.E.B. Du Bois, particularly Du Bois’ “The Souls of Black Folk”, and one of its central themes―the veil. A product of racial injustice that is a metaphorical lens through which Black bodies are observed and experienced, references to the veil appear throughout the artist’s work, whether in large swaths of color that obscure his figures or in the recurring use of a raindrop motif as both an active and passive element in his canvasses. Marking the Dominic Chambers s first solo presentation in the United Kingdom, “Meraki” includes expansive paintings, brightly colored studies, and several works on paper. Chambers, born in St. Louis, MO and currently based in New Haven, CT, is best known for his vivid, colorful paintings that frequently depict scenes of leisure and contemplation as a mode for exploring ideas of personal interiority. In this exhibition, the artist expands his lens to the realm of devotion, engaging themes of inspired connection to work, art, and the natural world. In creating his latest body of work, Chambers took the idea of “meraki”, a Greek word meaning “to pour one’s soul into one’s work,” as an origin point. As the title of the exhibition, Chambers uses this concept as a frame of inquiry, contemplating what it might mean to pour oneself into a creative endeavor and how the concept of the soul, or one’s own interiority, can intersect with ideas of devotion. These themes are poetically illustrated in “The Summoning World (Studio Angel)” (2024), a large-scale painting that blends the artist’s studio with a serene landscape, populated by a single, reclining angel. Chambers identifies this angel as Gabriel, of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, referencing the long tradition of angels functioning as messengers. Often acting as divine intermediaries bearing important news or a spark of inspiration, the figure of the angel has appeared for centuries across religious texts, literature, and art history—from the work of Leonardo Da Vinci to that of Kerry James Marshall. While Chambers’ warm, yellow-orange tones in “The Summoning World (Studio Angel)” suggest the golden settings of Fra Angelico, the scene, which is hung with artworks in various states of completion, also recalls Henri Matisse’s “The Red Studio” (1911). Astute viewers will note that some of the paintings depicted can be found hanging in the gallery exhibition. Here, Chambers places the painter in the role of the summoner, bringing images and objects into the material world from another realm. Chambers also looks to the natural world as a space of devotion and replenishment. In his new “Thunderscape” (2024) series, the artist depicts minute figures amidst landscapes of rolling hills and colossal trees, with each canvas drenched in rich, vibrant color. These works in particular reveal the influence of Magical Realism in Chambers’ practice—in naming the series, he envisioned a surreal vista, where the shadows from tree branches became lightning bolts. In this world, the electrified landscape comes alive with sound, creating the titular thunderscape. Chambers’ “Thunderscapes” also feature flying kites, some tethered, others autonomous, racing through the skies. Their presence in the series suggests they have escaped those picture planes to enter new canvases; they function as avatars, for either the artist or the creative spirit, time traveling across exhibitions and bodies of work. Throughout the exhibition Chambers expands his explorations of leisure and interiority begun in earlier exhibitions, he finds a new site for the replenishment of personal interiority in devotion, considering the spiritual as well as the bodily and intellectual, painting beyond the figurative and capturing the psyche.

Photo: Dominic Chambers, Of Stars and Clouds, 2024, Oil on linen, 55 x 60 inches / 139.7 x 152.4 cm, Photo by Daniel Kukla, © Dominic Chambers, Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery

Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 1 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 8/7-9/11/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com/