Curated by Antwaun Sargent
October 7–December 18,2021
Grosvenor Hill, London
Gagosian is pleased to present Social Works II, the sequel to the American chapter that was on view at the gallery in New York.
Curated by #antwaunsargent, Social Works II foregrounds artists from the African diaspora and their insights into the relationship between space—personal, public, institutional, and psychic—and social and artistic practice.
Bringing together intergenerational artists working in different mediums, Social Works II considers geography and its role in informing how identity is created and experienced through communities and spaces.
Sumayya Vally, principal of the Johannesburg/London-based studio Counterspace and architect of the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion, has produced a fragment of wall that will transform itself over time, functioning as an interactive site for research and ritual. Architect and artist David Adjaye presents a group of sculptural forms made using a rammed earth technique inherited from West African architectural vernacular. Examining ideas of landscape in the context of metropolitan #London, Adjaye probes the relationship between the earth and the built environment. In Lubaina Himid's mixed-media collage A Fashionable Marriage: The Art Critic(1986)—a study for her noted 1987 installation of painted and cut-out figures, A Fashionable Marriage—the protagonist of the British Black Arts movement of the 1980s riffs on Marriage A-la-Mode, painter William Hogarth's eighteenth-century moralizing satire of the British upper class. Himid turns Hogarth's critique of greed and overconsumption into a broader moral commentary on the British slave trade. Isaac Julien, a pioneer of multiscreen installation, presents the #London premiere of Lessons of the Hour (2019), a contemplative journey into the life and work of Frederick Douglass, the visionary African American abolitionist.
Further information in the press release to download
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