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The gallery will be closed from December 21, 2024 through January 6, 2025. We will reopen on Tuesday, January 7th.
Rhona Hoffman Gallery, founded originally as Young Hoffman Gallery in 1976, specializesin international contemporary art in all media, and art that is conceptually, formally, or socio-politically based. From its inception, the gallery has launched emerging artists’ careers. In the seventies, Young Hoffman Gallery was one of the first galleries to offer exhibitions to women artists including Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Sylvia Plimack Mangold.
Since 1983, when Rhona Hoffman and Donald Young announced the establishment of separate galleries, Rhona Hoffman Gallery has continued to show young and emerging artists alongside established ones. Among the artists the gallery has exhibited and/or continues to exhibit are Vito Acconci, Derrick Adams, Spencer Finch, Leon Golub, Robert Heinecken, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Sol LeWitt, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Ryman, Fred Sandback, Lorna Simpson, Nancy Spero, Richard Tuttle, Carrie Mae Weems, Kehinde Wiley, and Amanda Williams.
Rhona Hoffman Gallery is very active in the Chicago arts community and maintains strong relationships with museums, helping to place important works in their collections and within their programs. Additionally, the gallery gives exposure to artists currently living in Chicago such as, Julia Fish, Judy Ledgerwood, Michael Rakowitz, Richard Rezac, David Schutter, Amanda Williams, and Anne Wilson.
Image: View of Rhona Hoffman Gallery
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\r\nOpening Reception: Friday, April 21, 5-7:30pm
Rhona Hoffman Gallery is very pleased to present New York-based photographer Deana Lawson’s second solo exhibition. Deana Lawson carefully orchestrates and captures domestic portraiture that is richly detailed, intimate, and communicates a sincere love for the black body and interpersonal relationships. Raw, imperfect settings like a chaotic apartment with torn furniture and roughly covered windows, drawn into precise focus with Deana Lawson’s large format camera, provide a stage for the subjects, who are strangers or recent acquaintances Deana Lawson is drawn to photograph. Each work paints a rich narrative of humanity, selfhood, and relationships; taken together, Deana Lawson’s oeuvre provides a singular, collective portrait of the African diaspora and African-American identity. Musician and critic Greg Tate recently wrote, “Drawing the spectator’s eye to how people command space within the frame, how they proclaim ownership of selfhood before the camera is a recurring motif. Her work seems always about the desire to represent social intimacies that defy stereotype and pathology while subtly acknowledging the vitality of lives abandoned by the dominant social order.”
\r\n\r\nDeana Lawson’s new works, partially also on view in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, deepen her exploration of male and female strength, sexuality, and familial dynamics. After photographing in the Caribbean, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lawson returned to the American landscape, picturing the black body in Alabama, Los Angeles, and Rochester, NY. Her photographs subvert simple categorization and dominant cultural stereotypes. In Sons of Cush, 2017, the tough appearance of aheavily muscled, tattooed man is countered by his soft, charming eyes and protective embrace of a lovingly-dressed infant. In Nicole, a nude woman crouches on a rug like a tigress; juxtaposing her fiercely confrontational and seductive gaze is the pink and purple children’s playhouse positioned directly behind her. Deana Lawson plans each thoughtful detail in her compositions, yet she allows space for the workings of chance, humanity, and the magic of photography.
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