Esteban Jefferson

May 25th, 2020

★★★☆☆

On until 14 January 2024

Despite the artist’s and the gallery’s best efforts, Jefferson’s paintings betray the show’s stated purpose. Already from the title (the day of George Floyd’s killing), this project wishes to reactivate the anticolonial and antiracist critique of memorials in the public realm that dominated 2020’s summer of violence and iconoclasm.

Masterful but ghostly pencil panels of public statues and edifices in New York to which the artist added evolving oil overlays of graffiti form the bulk of the show. One series tracks the removal in 2021 of Theodore Roosevelt’s horseback statue from the American Museum of Natural History. Another looks at the boarded-up façade of a Dior store and the shuttered front of a Brooklyn deli.

But because many of the subjects are also the objects of art history – in one picture, David Hammonds’ 1990 African-American Flag – Jefferson must treat them as such and they run away from him. The graffiti marks are too exuberant and luminous, and their presence confusing. But that’s only for the better because these interventions breathe a life of their own into the artefacts Jefferson would have us condemn. This exhibition is thus a warning to would-be propagandists: trust art at your peril.


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

Manfred Pernice, Megan Plunknett, >anticorpo< at Galerie Neu and Emalin ★★★★☆

Manfred Pernice, Megan Plunknett

>anticorpo<

★★★★☆

Such ‘80s nostalgia for meaning before history’s end is a comfort blanket.

Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Bad Luck Rock at Josh Lilley ★★☆☆☆

Sula Bermúdez-Silverman

Bad Luck Rock

★★☆☆☆

This is a poor man’s version of history or a philistine collector’s absolution.

Michael Andrew Page, Claustrum at Project Native Informant ★★★★☆

Michael Andrew Page

Claustrum

★★★★☆

Page’s tent, brain, and the cathedral take the same form for a pretty good reason.

Ed Webb-Ingall, A Bedroom for Everyone at PEER ★☆☆☆☆

Ed Webb-Ingall

A Bedroom for Everyone

★☆☆☆☆

How can art improve the lives of communities? Wrong answers only.

Joanne Burke, Oes with works like Esses at Soft Opening ★★★★☆

Joanne Burke

Oes with works like Esses

★★★★☆

Hot metal is that, like water, it spills away from the mould.

Botond Keresztesi, NPC (No-one Paints Chrysopoeia) at Seventeen ★★★☆☆

Botond Keresztesi

NPC (No-one Paints Chrysopoeia)

★★★☆☆

There is no “too much” in this fantasy meme game.

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