White Cube invites Frieze 91 Members for an exclusive Breakfast and last chance Private View of Sarah Morris and Tunji Adeniyi-Jones exhibitions at White Cube Bermondsey.
Saturday 8 January 2022, 9-11.30am
White Cube Bermondsey
144-152 Bermondsey Street
London, SE1 3TQ
Sarah Morris, Means of Escape
Morris considers the city as a living, evolving organism and thinks of these new paintings as ‘anthropocene forms’ − functional, engineered, yet fragile. She says that her paintings create ‘an internal, imaginary, spatial sense that is slow, precise and quite open [...] a set of images and realities that haven’t been made before’. In her new ‘Spiderweb’ series, she draws on the recent experience of enforced restrictions and confinement that has resulted in an abrupt shift in temporal focus and social habits. Taking the improvised structure of a spiderweb as their starting point, the paintings’ arrangements of lines converge and fragment, creating shard-like shapes and dots of varying sizes, which emerge, hover and recede from the paintings’ surfaces. Rendered in Morris’s recognisable palette, the paintings explore spatial disorientation, perception and cognition.
Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, That Which Binds Us
Coinciding with the artist’s inaugural UK museum presentation ‘Astral Reflections’ at Charleston in Sussex, the works focus on expressive figuration and, as the artist states, ‘how the transformative nature of the Black experience is nourished by travel, movement and cultural hybridity’. Informed by his own Yoruba heritage, in his paintings Adeniyi-Jones fuses West African mythology and iconography with the seeming immutability of the Western art canon.
The diverse and disparate influences the artist draws upon include pioneering Nigerian artists such as Ben Enwonwu and Bruce Onobrakpeya, which ultimately reflect a desire to represent not just African subjects, but the human form freed from the specifics of time and place. Focusing on the human form as a timeless instrument for storytelling, his luminous paintings are populated by muscular bodies engaged in ritual dance-like movements or classical posturing. Both ‘The Youth’ and ‘The Virtues’ series, for example, present groups of figures in a dark and rich palette; combining shades of deep purple with indigo and flashes of hot pink, their quality of movement reminisces both African performance masquerade dress and Léon Bakst’s exuberant costume designs for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1909–29).