ART CITIES:N.York-Sanford Biggers

For over two decades, Sanford Biggers has been developing a singular body of work that is deeply informed by African American history and traditions, and sustains a rich dialog with contemporary art on a national and international level, referencing urban culture, the body, sacred geometry, and American symbolism. As creative director and keyboardist, he fronts Moon Medicin, a multimedia concept band that straddles visual art and music with performances staged against a backdrop of curated sound effects and video.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Marianne Boesky Gallery Archive

In his solo exhibition “Soft Truths” Sanford Biggers delves into the parallels between our experiences with and understanding of Classical sculpture, extending his career-long engagement with aesthetics, cultural narratives, and the body politic. The exhibition features a selection of new marble sculptures from the “Chimeras” series and quilt-based paintings and sculpture works. In recent years, the body has become more overt in Biggers’ work. In 2015, he created the socially charged “Laocoön (Fatal Bert)” inflatable sculpture and began his much-acclaimed “BAM” series composed of bronze sculptures recast from fragments of wooden African statues that have been anonymized through dipping in wax and then ballistically ‘resculpted’. Following a residency as a 2017 American Academy Fellow in Rome, the artist recently began working in marble. Drawing on and playing with the tradition of working in this medium, Biggers creates hybridized forms that transpose, combine and juxtapose classical and historical subjects to create alternative meanings and produce what he calls “future ethnographies”.  Biggers’ newest series “Chimeras” explores how the removal and transformation of both Greco-Roman and African sculpture from their original use and presentation have influenced commonly misunderstood notions of culture and aesthetics to unexpected and often detrimental effects. The “Chimeras” rendered in marble, merge African and European masks, busts, and figures into new forms – an emergent state of transformation. Like their namesake suggests, the figures borrow and blend from various sources, giving rise to wholly new creatures that retain vestiges of their pasts, while prompting questions surrounding origins, authenticity and the historical dissemination and appropriation of cultural patrimony that continues into today. Within the exhibition, these works are presented atop modular, wooden pedestals, further dismantling the Western canonical presentation of marbles as permanent and immobile and establishing a new physical relationship between the sculpture and the viewer. The fall of empires and the concealed material narratives of Greco Roman sculpture were focal points of the artist’s 2017 residency and inform the body of work on display in the exhibition. In his “Chimeras”, Biggers updates the millennia-old practice of recreating canonical Classical and Hellenistic objects by conceptually and formally patchworking them together with a wide array of iconic African objects from the 14^th-20^th centuries. Using classical and contemporary techniques to investigate these objects’ associated myths and narratives, Biggers presents a “chopped and screwed” critique of Western culture.

Photo: Sanford Biggers, Orpheus, 2020, Antique quilt, assorted textiles, wood, 208.3 x 212.1 cm, © Sanford Biggers,Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery

Info:  Marianne Boesky Gallery, 507 West 24 Street, New York, Duration: 30/10-19/12/2020, Days & Hours: 10:00-18:00 (by appointment), https://marianneboeskygallery.com