![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721419480/m6e3b42bb2btwf0wjidg.gif\")
After founding her eponymous gallery in Seattle in 2012, Mariane Ibrahim inaugurated a space in Chicago in 2019, affirming her commitment to an ambitious, international artistic program. In September 2021, she opened her first European venue in Paris, followed in February 2023 with a third space in Mexico City.
Since its creation, the gallery has successfully supported established and emerging artists such as Amoako Boafo, Clotilde Jiménez, Eva Jospin, Ayana V. Jackson, Zohra Opoku, and more recently, Lorraine O’Grady. Present at the most prestigious contemporary art fairs worldwide, the gallery has distinguished itself with award-winning presentations, attesting to the quality of its programming and the recognition it inspires within the art world.
The mission of Mariane Ibrahim, a Franco-Somali art dealer and gallerist, is to champion and promote the diversity of global artistic practices, with a particular focus on Africa and its diaspora. In 2016, she appeared on Artnet’s list of promising art dealers under 40. In 2022, she was included in ArtReview’s list of the 100 most influential figures in the art world today. She has also been featured in various media, including FT, WSJ, Le Monde, Marie Claire, Vogue, and Kinfolk.
Image: Djabril Boukhenaïssi, Once upon a midnight dreary. Installation View. Courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim.
Member Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA)
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Through painting, collage, drawing, and sculpture, the orange emerges as a recurring motif and metaphor. It evokes the sweetness and abundance of family histories, but also the omissions, secrets, and unresolved tensions that pass from one generation to the next. Like the fruit itself, lineage carries both nourishment and decay. Beneath its vibrant skin lies stories that shape a family's character and flavor, revealing how memory—and the spaces where memories falter—becomes embedded within the narratives we inherit.
Clotilde Jiménez, China de Mayagüez, 2026. Detail. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim.
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Take Me to the Water presents a holistic survey of Jackson’s work to date, a culmination of varied discursive elements present in Jackson’s more than a decade long career. These portraits and movement studies offer a sense of the breadth of her practice, while at the same time taking her into new territories with regard to the range of her performances.
Jackson has used the archival impulse to assess the impact of the colonial gaze on the history of photography and its relationship to ideas about the body. She uses her lens to deconstruct 19th and early 20th century portraiture as a means for questioning photography’s role in constructing identities. Her thesis is further complicated by the presence of the artist’s figure. She uses her own body to perform the characters with whom she concerns herself.
Jackson's images have a compelling complexity: They are richly laced historical allusions, reappropriations of past moments and maps of the ethical considerations involved in the relationship between photographer, subject and viewer.
While Take Me to the Water is consistent with the artists ongoing “memory work,” it is a striking departure from her commitment to lived histories as she has chosen to embrace the magical worlds of speculative fiction. Her new characters inhabit an aquatopia populated by aquahumanoids whose attributes are inspired by African and African Diasporic water spirits. From Olokun to Mame Coumba bang, from Kianda to Drexciya, from Yenanja to Mamiwata, Jackson is interested in “the mythic worlds we have studied,” yet emphasizes that she is, “more concerned with those we have been taught to forget.”
Top image: Ayana V. Jackson, Double Goddess ... A Sighting in the Abyss, 2019
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Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to announce Florine Démosthène’s first solo exhibition with the gallery,“Between Possibility and Actuality.” On view from November 2 - December 21, 2019, the show celebrates the second presentation at the gallery’s Chicago space. Démosthène lures you into a phantasmagoric sphere with her sparkly surfaces and her amphibious marble-like figures adorned with aquatic accents.
Démosthène’s contemporary take on the body, in the form of multi-media paintings and collage, represent otherworldly dystopian characteristics, furthering the artists’ study of our divine spirit. Démosthène’s heroines criticize beauty canons through the narrative of her self-made feminine heros. In this new body of work, the artist questions, “How do we connect to our inner essence? How do we connect to our ‘self,’ while disconnecting from stories and religions we have been taught?”
The duality of her figures consider stereotypical and two-dimensional notions of the black female body. The artist presents her adulation for duplicates by portraying her own body, often duplicated. The existence of twins has provoked curiosity and veneration amongst numerous societies, particularly in West African and Haitian sacred cultures.
Démosthène’s art is comprehensively performative, emphasizing flesh and form among an evanescent backdrop. The use of mylar, inherent to her former architectural training, enhance the lack of permanence in the background suggesting the figures are floating and translucent. Between reverie and reality, dream and nightmare, possibility and actuality, Démosthène plunges the viewer into her intertwined almost science-fiction dimension.
Image: Florine Démosthène
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Hauntology: Ghostly Matters
Group exhibition. Curated by Aindrea Emelife
27 JANUARY - 1 APRIL 2023
Exhibiting Artists:
Okiki Akinfe
ruby onyinyechi amanze
M. Florine Démosthène
Miranda Forrester
Taiye Idahor
Shannon T. Lewis
Olukemi Lijadu
Temitayo Ogunbiyi
“Black experience in any modern city or town in the Americas is a haunting. One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes.”
- DIONNE BRAND, A Map to the Door of No Return
Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to announce Hauntology: Ghostly Matters, a group exhibition curated by Nigerian-British curator, Aindrea Emelife. The show is on view in Chicago from January 27 - April 1, 2023, featuring work by OkikioluwaAkinfe, ruby onyinyechi amanze, M. Florine Démosthène, Miranda Forrester, Taiye Idahor, Shannon T. Lewis, Olukemi Lijadu and Temitayo Ogunbiyi.
Coined by Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Specters of Marx, Hauntology is used to describe a sense in which contemporary culture is quite literally haunted by the “lost futures” of modernity. Emelife positions this perspective alongside the African concept of Ubuntu, in which our sense of self is shaped by our relationships with others, creating a way of living that begins with the translation and resulting premise, “I am” only because “we are.\" With this, the exhibition explores the ideas of Black womanhood - the soul, the body, the mind - and seeks to find healing and restoration, promoting oneness rather than fragmentation by uniting the many perspectives of female artists from Africa and the diaspora.
The work of Olukemi Lijadu emphasizes the concept of African anthropology and how that relates to personhood and the body in a holistic sense. One of the crossover themes explores how Black womanhood is also embedded in an intricate network of relationships with family (living and dead), the community, God and nature. This view is the antithesis of Greek and the later Cartesian view with its dualistic split between body and soul. The film explores the artist’s relationship with religion, informed by her grandmother, a study of African philosophy, and her Catholic upbringing which come together to represent the fragments of her identity.
Avery F. Gordon’s book Ghostly Matters talks about the haunting of history peeking through, in which she writes, “haunting is not the same as being exploited, traumatized, or oppressed, although it usually involves these experiences or is produced by them.” Instead, Gordon argues, haunting is a kind of “animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known.”
The past and the present are not discrete categories, like dead and alive, planes on top of planes. Collage speaks to this construction, as embodied by Shannon T. Lewis whose assemblage painting style fragments the form to whimsical effect, but it is in the pursuit of freedom; freedom from stereotype, archetype and marginalization. They are free in their multiplicity, as are Okikioluwa Akinfe’s bodies, which retreat and confront from within blurred lines between figuration and abstraction. With lyrical fluidity, Akinfe interrogates social body language and how race and cultural upbringing enhances or weakens archetypes applied to Black women.
Temitayo Ogunbiyi envisions how parts of the body, her own and other bodies of color, can come together to create new compositions that consider community, environment, interdependence, and spirituality. Looking principally to forms found in nature, and how they can be emulated by human gestures such as hairstyling, the work brings together tradition and nature. Inspired by Yoruba adages, the work imbues the idea that every living being has a spirit.
Similarly, Taiye Idahor’s focus on hair as a motif symbolizes ancestral connections, family, lineage and history. Unraveling the complexities of identity, her work employs a surrealistic style embedded with symbols that reflecttradition and memory.
M. Florine Démosthène exists between dream and nightmare, possibility and actually, as she explores the Black female body as a myriad of collective experiences beyond immediate interpretations based on sensuality. Whereas Miranda Forrester’s exploration of the queer Black female gaze also serves to address the invisibility of women of color in art history.
The show also nods to Toni Morrison’s Sula, which imagines Black women dreaming as one, imagining possible and impossible futures. ruby onyinyechi amanze forms a world that imagines boundless futures for Black women. Celebrating the oneness of ubuntu, the weightlessness of the work negotiates away from the heaviness of linear time, understanding the contemporary mythologies and the futuristic feeling of now.
\"Positioned squarely in a fixed liminality, the show explores spaces of hybridity that Black women exist in. As Black women, we are haunted by expectations, historical and cultural stereotypes, that are fixed principally on our bodies and how they exist and have existed in the world. These artists create as protection, to explore and create the possibilities of the future and new memories of the past. It is survival. Haunting is not negative, it is a profound invention.” - Aindrea Emelife
“There is so much beauty that fills voids. I look right into my own personal family history. Pride is found in knowing who you are.”
Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to announce 50 lbs., the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Haitian American painter Patrick Eugène.
“50 pounds” is a common weight restriction airline companies enforce on travelers. But what if you had to carry your entire life with you? With just fifty pounds of luggage, is one meant to summon up and journey with the entirety of their life?
Patrick Eugène’s paintings are tributes, ones formed not from reference photographs, but from a natural likeness and resemblance to his ancestry. The paintings persist and evoke dignity, refinement, and optimism. Clothing is thrown into bags in fury and with urgency. The figures' expressions are full of hope, worry, and slight anticipation. Through portraits of subjects on the outset of a journey, both physical and mental, Eugène emphasizes the radical effect migration can have on countries and people, even uninvolved.
Haiti is the perfect archetype of Pan-Africanism, and a powerful example of how alliance to a larger diasporic community can enable a sense of freedom and kinship. It is the land of one of the most successful revolutions against oppression in human history, and has not only inspired others, but the nation has lent its soldiers and strategic expertise to foreign anti-colonial movements of liberation for over 200 years. In recent decades, the nation of Haiti has been troubled with economic, socio, and geopolitical tensions, which has resulted in the further displacement of people, but not memory or pride. 50 lbs., is a testament to Eugène’s personal understanding of migration and the effect it has had on his perceptions of Usonianism.
In the works, viewers are transported through time, each indicating to instances – a man sitting on his luggage, observing his surroundings in fascination; a group of strangers, despite being in an unfamiliar place, all experiencing a sense of belonging, united against common adversity. Many of the works also pay homage to the strength and grace of the females in his family. Pearls symbolize their enduring class, even in hard times and luscious plants embellish the compositions, his grandmas love for gardening creating an everlasting connection with those he cherishes most dearly.
50 lbs. also unveils Eugène's first media installations, establishing an immersive atmosphere and evoking the environment of the 1960s–70s migration, ultimately bringing unprecedented insight into some of life's toughest decisions made from necessity. Two installations are presented: one consisting of various pieces of luggage, items pouring out small symbols, and the other containing mementos symbolic to a Haitian immigrant, such as rosary beads, dolls, and letters.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a collaboration with D-Composed, a Chicago based Black chamber music collective, who will present the works of Haitian and African American composers.
The exhibition text was inspired from “Matriarchal Muses, Haitian Migration, and the American Dream”: An Interview with Visual Artist, Patrick Eugene and curator, Lauren Tate Baeza. Direct excerpts are included.
About D-Composed:
Started in 2017 by Kori Coleman and yelley taylor and led by their mission to uplift and empower society through the music of Black composers, this Chicago-based creative incubator acts as a bridge between the past and present to the future of representation, music-centered experiences, and the communal power of Black composers and their impact. As the only all-Black ensemble and the only ensemble that focuses exclusively on the works of Black composers in Chicago, D-Composed partners with institutions with a proven commitment to communities of color.
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For Neely, the difference between two types of line is not so much a precious commitment to formal queries that lead nowhere outside of the canvas; rather these marks are an earnest stab at solving real problems in expressing one’s own history and the histories that are passed through us by the act of mark making.
Neely’s canvases are surfaces taught with conflict, line, color and language. The marks ricochet and collide off one another, their meanings always affected by their proximity to other gestures. In Neely’s paintings, memory, speech, and feeling are not necessarily linear or discrete expressions and experiences but are rather codependent on a series of contexts that produce, interrupt and re-form them over time.
Her paintings give a feeling of catharsis, bursting with colorful and calligraphic strokes on delicate and soft backgrounds. The tableaus propose the peace that comes through an ongoing process of renegotiation and reiteration. If each line holds expressions of identity, values, and memory passed through generations of family and friendships, Neely’s consistent modulation of gesture and color in her own vernacular suggest the mutability and evolution of these values over time and geography. The process is about intricacies of interpretation with the resulting works expressing a methodological approach to language that remainsvulnerable to Neely’s own ongoing confrontation with selfhood.
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15 JULY - 26 AUGUST 2023
![\"Terra](\"https://artlogic-res.cloudinary.com/w_1400,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto/ws-marianeibrahimgallery/usr/images/exhibitions/group_images_override/67/ls-009-image.jpg\")
Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to announce its first exhibition dedicated to ceramics: “Terra Recognita: A Ceramic Story.” The show features new works by Nadira Husain, Zizipho Poswa, Jennifer Rochlin, Leena Similu, and Shafei Xia and is on view in Chicago from July 15 – August 26, 2023.
Ceramics—despite being one of the world’s oldest art forms—have been discovered and rediscovered time and time again and with the work of these five artists, the medium is once again being challenged in both form and function. Terra cognita refers to the idea of exploring charted territories and discovering new lands. The exhibition displays a broad stroke of diverse cultures and ceramic practices through the works of the exhibiting artists. As vessels, each of the works’ complexities of the present, past, and future highlight the artists and their individual cultures.
This body of work boasts large, hand-coiled sculptures, reflective pieces, and painted works. The vessels incorporate symbols and stories, representing the artists’ Individual histories in all their forms. The works of these artists are their means of storytelling, exploring themes of cultural identity and appropriation through the lenses of race, gender, and personal identity.
Powsa and Similu view their works as extensions of themselves, blurring the lines between current and former realities in a tangible artistic practice. Poswa’s large hand-coiled works are a testament to African womanhood, inspired by her Xhosa background and paying tribute to the concept of “umthalwo.” Similu’ssculptures, additionally were born out of her experience of becoming a mother, reflecting on her West African origins, ancestors, and her introduction of synthetic hair in pieces reflected on her earliest memories of reconciling with her sense of self and the predicament of where to associate. Thereconciliation of her African heritage with an upbringing in a European-dominated society inspired an interest in cultural identifiers and an exploration of her Mother’s Cameroon lineage and culture that her child would inherit.
Meanwhile, Husain’s hybrid paintings integrate symbols and stories from different cultural contexts, merging anthropomorphic beings from furry fandoms, with Indian miniature painting references, immersed in an organic, Libidinal, vegetal universe. Rochlin’s work moreover; displays California’s lush flora and fauna, often referencing pop culture, personal narratives, and art history. Xia’s works are emanations of the artist’s feelings of love, desire, jealousy, and violence. In an inherently human artistic practice, represented explicitly or symbolically, depending on the case, as an omnipresent feature of the work of Shafei. The artist often represents herself as a tiger, a symbol of power and instinctive force, which in Chinese alchemy indicates the active principle, of energy as opposed to the passive principle.
These women form carriers of their stories and lives, expressing to the world an undying loyalty to themselves and their desires.
Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to present the gallery’s second solo exhibition with No Martins entitled, Encontros Políticos (Political Encounters)…Part 2. The exhibition will be on view from September 15 through October 28, 2023.
A trip to the beach is one of life's simplest and most pleasurable experiences. But to whom is this pleasure given? For whom is it forbidden? While Brazil, unlike the United States, never had laws sanctioning racism and segregation, these practices were and are standard, customary, and enforced against Brazil’s Black population. Going to the beach as a Black Brazilian brings to bare the question of personhood and, by extension, Black Brazilians’ right to be self-possessed in public.
Brazilian beaches as the site of these kinds of encounters recalls the tragic history of the enslavement of Africans and their descendants. Africans first arrived in Brazil, having crossed the Atlantic by boat, as early as the mid 1500s. Rio de Janeiro, home to some of Brazil’s most beautiful and elite beaches, was a major slave port. So was Salvador in the northeastern state of Bahia. Brazilian slavery ended only in 1888, leaving repercussions and legacies that still unduly influence Black Brazilian life. One can not help but to consider the policing of Black Brazilian bodies on Brazilian beaches in the 21st century as a continuation of the trading in Black bodies and the servitude forced upon Black bodies by the Portuguese and ruling white Brazilian elite. Time has certainly moved forward but the dial has not turned sufficiently towards racial democracy.
No Martins’ newest body of work confronts Brazil’s aspirational thesis of racial democracy. Through a series of nine large scale canvases, Martins depicts dark skinned Black people of varying genders, body types, friend groups, and familial dynamics in varying states of repose and interaction. Their gaze is turned towards each other, the ocean, or whatever thing they’re focused on - but never towards the viewer. Intentionally, Martins’ figures have no concern for anyone but themselves and the experience of sun, salt, and sea. In this manner, Martins gifts the Black people in his paintings an agency that is not recognized by the broader Brazilian society.
In the work Continuidade (2023), two young children play in the sand just inches away from their grandparents’ feet. The grandparents are keeping a watchful eye of their grandchildren while standing in front of a vendor selling beach toys. Attached to the vendor’s cart is a Brazilian flag.
The actual Brazilian flag is imprinted with the phrase “Ordem e Progresso”, in English, “Order and Progress”. The notion of order implies, at a minimum, state sanctioned actions that allow order to be maintained. It also implies that the state can decide to enact and enforce order however and whenever it sees fit. Brazil’s twenty-one year military dictatorship affirms this notion. The ongoing stigmatization put upon residents of Brazil’s favelas and enforced, in the name of law and order, by police action in those communities, affirms this notion. The most recent government led by military trained, political conservative, President João Bolsonaro, most certainly affirms this notion.
Martins’ Brazilian flag is imprinted with the Portuguese phrase “Progresso é liberdade ao povo”, translated in English as “Progress is freedom for the people.” Here Martins suggests that with liberation comes the potential for the relaxation of vigilance and subsequently, the possibility of actual joy and rest for Black Brazilians. In choosing freedom, Black Brazilians would cease being politicized subjects of a system seeks their demise. Their humanity would not be at stake.
Another work, Vendedores (2023), depicts five beach vendors, with their wares surrounding them, taking a break, and talking amongst themselves. In the background, three young women have entered the Atlantic Ocean. In a country like Brazil, where economic disparity is significant and ongoing, the most vulnerable of Brazilian society (who are often, though not exclusively Black Brazilians) have few viable, legal work options so they take on roles in the informal economy, such as the individuals Martins depicts in this work.
Martins’ work questions head on the validity and the fragility of racial democracy in Brazil as evidenced by the day to day lives of Black Brazilians. By depicting Black Brazilian leisure on the beach - a key symbol of Brazilian cultural heritage - Martins confronts fundamentally racist and classist beliefs held by a society intent on performing Black subjugation. By affirming Black Brazilians’ right to pleasure and rest, Martins disturbs the notion of racial democracy, and affirms that a country who believes in order as key to progress, and in the name of order and progress, suppresses liberation, can not and will not support and uplift Black Brazilian humanity. Only by inverting the promise of the nation state - and making freedom the desired outcome (rather than progress) - will Black Brazilians have the possibility to claim, occupy, and negotiate their humanity. Key in this negotiation, of course, is the choice of when, where, and how to rest. However, the converse may also be true: neither will Brazilian society be able to rest, until Black Brazilians are considered as and able to be whole humans.
Excerpt from a piece written on behalf of the exhibition enetitled, Política da praia, Política do povo / Beach Politics, People Politics, by curator and writer Negarra A. Kudumu.
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Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to announce a group exhibition curated by Jérôme Sans, \"Almost here, Almost there, Almost home\" presenting work by Joël Andrianomearisoa, Alexandre Gourçon, Mwangi Hutter, and Tony Lewis, whose vocabularies converge on a minimalist aesthetic to explore complex emotions.
With an economy of means and color, the artists reflect upon the nature of dualities and emotion as they search for alignment amongst opposition. As the ever-evolving conversations on identity politics lead us to question the truth, use and confines of labels, these works call into question the relevance of categorizing, alluding to humanity’s innate tendency to divide and classify in order to make sense of the world.
From realism to abstraction, the artists explore the poetry of duality, whether it be through entangling bodies that search for unison within contradictions, the layering of material, or the meticulous two-fold treatment of textiles. Rubbing graphite, obsessively folding and refolding, dripping or smudging paint: each artist holds an intimate, almost ritualistic process with their material, that echoes a quest to blur certainties and distort clear distinctions. Exploring the complexity of the world through modest means, the works find poetry within abstraction and absence. In the cracks of the folds, in the empty spaces of the page, lie an ode to simplicity, to ambiguous layers of meaning and interpretations. Exceptionally brought together for the first time in this show, whose title is drawn from one of Joël Andrianomearisoa’s works, these four artists praise moments of silent intimacy and finding meaning, and emotion, in what lies within the interstices.
Best known for his monumental installations and his investigation of the materiality of sentiments, Joël Andrianomearisoa (b. 1977, Madagascar) reintroduces poetic space, and emotions into an aesthetic that had hitherto abdicated the individual, gesture, and voice in favor of a smooth, minimal rendering. Putting two opposing traditions back-to-back, he deftly blends the sentimentality of the digital age with the great, cold, frozen-in-time aesthetic of minimalism, asserting the need to reinject poetic language into contemporary artistic practices.
Like a landscape, a musical score, or a notebook on which writing drips and overturns meaning, his three textile works Geometry and tales of our desiresplay with an ambiguity between rigidity and liquidity, presence and absence. A series of 10 of his eponymous drawings accompany these works, like sketches, echoes of the roughly drawn, almost dancing, black lines. Terrain de tous les possible showcases his emblematic black vocabulary, while demonstrating another use of textile which focuses on cuts, folds and the suggestiveness of materiality to convey sentimental meanings. Comprised of 200 Beldi glasses and 30 ceramic plates which each hold a unique drawing by the artist, Almost Here, Almost There, Almost Home is produced in Morocco, underlining local production that blends art and craft. Combining textile, paper, glass and ceramics, all characteristic elements of the artist’s language, the works reveal a world of vibrations and ambiguities, both sensitive and poetic.
Alexandre Gourçon (b. 1993, Paris) manipulates canvas and textile to create entirely new scenarios with folds, textures, and shadows. In the manner of the costume designer Madame Grès, his work is based on the act of folding, refolding, draping, stretching and sewing, as he merges meticulous, artisanal work with a minimalist aesthetic. Using pale often monochrome colors, he explores the potential of materiality to translate and extract fragments of emotion.
For this exhibition, the artist presents two canvases La Voix Silencieuse and La Danse Immobile, neatly split in two parts, making textures and volumes. These works play with dualisms, inciting to reflect upon the binaries that make up life: fullness and void, light and obscurity, happiness and pain. These opposites and contradictions lie at the heart of his extremely intimate, sensitive works, while he provides no answers but suggests meaning through folds that vibrate like sensual, visceral entities. In the manner of a skin, his fragile canvases are like visual poetry in which each wrinkle, each fold silently counts intimate stories.
Mwangi Hutter (Ingrid Mwangi, b. 1975, Kenya; Robert Hutter, b. 1964, Germany) fused their names in 2005 to become one single artistic identity, incorporating their respective gender and racial differences. Through a variety of media, Mwangi Hutter challenges traditional notions of identity, revisiting and calling into question collective biases. Often using and documenting their own bodies as theatres of intimacy, pain, and personal introspection intended for collective exorcism, they seek to translate changing societal realities, reflecting upon the construction of identities today and notions of belonging.
Works on paper from Mwangi Hutter’s Union series epitomize their use of the body to investigate the intricacies of intimacy and love. Entangling, opposing silhouettes appear in a quest to merge, to become one while roughly defined, blurry outlines and dripping watercolors seem to blend into the page. Playing with a dualistic black and white vocabulary, these works are poetic explorations of balances, equilibriums in love, of the complex negotiation of differences in romantic relationships, and of a search for fusion within intimate embraces.
Exploring social topics such as race, power, communication, and labor, Tony Lewis (b. 1986, Los Angeles) integrates poetry and text within a vocabulary of abstraction. By erasing, editing, and assembling words extracted from their source, from literary or popular references such as comic books, he plays with language as a material. Often using black and white, he turns to the medium of graphite for its potential to be stretched, smudged, rubbed and folded across a variety of handmade and found surfaces. From the personal to the political, playing with layers of material and of meaning, he explores what remains unsaid and concealed, to create new, unexpected abstract narratives.
For this show, Tony Lewis presents a site-specific installation comprised of floor drawings that stands as a sculpture in the room. Like a cloaked body, his enigmatic work hints at what remains hidden, playing with folds and the intricate handling of paper and graphite to produce ambiguous meanings. Situated at the border between drawing, sculpture and installation, this work appears like a living, organic entity that plays with oppositions, oscillating between rigidity and softness, strength and fragility, presence and absence.
Jérôme Sans is a curator, cultural agitator, and director of institutions, known internationally for his pioneering and transversal approach to new models of cultural institutions and exhibitions. He is the co-founder of the acclaimed Palais de Tokyo in Paris and was the director of the ground-breaking Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (UCCA). Since 2022, he has been Artistic Director of LagoAlgo, located in the heart of the Chapultepec Forest in Mexico City. He has curated numerous major exhibitions around the world, including the Taipei Biennale (2000), the Lyon Biennale (2005), Erwin Wurm at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (2022) and Noor Riyadh (2023).
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The show is open February 2nd through April 6, 2024 and marks Forrester’s first show in Chicago and with the gallery.
As her figures waver between figuration and abstraction throughout her work in Interiorities, Miranda Forrester paints instability at the edge between presence and disappearance. Her figures are liquid and incomplete bodies made from painterly outlines, tenuous gatherings of brushwork, and quick flashes of color. Like the queerness that they are informed by, they are painted in a language of fluidity, complexity, and mutability. Yet, despite the sense of almost frenetic precarity with the figures are rendered, Forrester’s scenes resonate with certain calm and quietude. The Black queer women painted here repose in comfort: they lie in each other’s arms, lean on doorways, and lounge on staircases. Taken together, Forrester’s paintings orient us towards a world in which Black queer people cannot be neatly defined and delimited but instead revel in the sanctity of their quotidian being.
Forrester’s paintings are faceless, but they do not lack identities. In this suite of paintings, five figures in the artist’s intimate orbit recur: herself, her partner, her infant daughter, and two of her friends. For the artist and those in her close circle, the figures are instantly recognizable purely from their shape, outline, and affect. Yet at the same time, they are ambiguous enough that the viewer can imagine themselves slipping into their bodies and living in the scene. Her figures simultaneously index precise individuality and slippery amorphousness; they mark the intimacy that is particular to Forrester’s relational life while also making room for the viewer to be touched by their own sentiments of identification and recognition.
Instead of painting her worlds on conventional opaque materials like canvas or wood, the artist opts for polycarbonate, a clear, glass-like material often used in architectural construction. Given this unique material configuration, looking at Forrester’s paintings occasions looking through them. We can sneak into the intimacies that work within and behind the painting: the frame and its backing boards, the gallery walls, and the shadows that the paintings cast on them. In turn, the built environment of our own world bleeds into what’s happening in the imagined world of Forrester’s paintings; figures seem to step into our own dimension. The surfaces are windows, transparent openings that allow us to slither in and out of the paintings, making us intimately linked with the life unfolding on the surface.
Forrester’s figures float in realms of open possibility. As they emerge into their unfinished states of being against transparent ground, they invite the viewer to envision Black queer women beyond the entrapments of being easily resolved.
Excerpted text by writer and critic Zoë Hopkins
Mariane Ibrahim presents Miranda Forrester's first solo exhibition in Chicago, titled Interiorities. The show is open February 2nd through April 5, 2024 and marks Forrester’s first show in Chicago and with the gallery.
As her figures waver between figuration and abstraction throughout her work in Interiorities, Miranda Forrester paints instability at the edge between presence and disappearance. Her figures are liquid and incomplete bodies made from painterly outlines, tenuous gatherings of brushwork, and quick flashes of color. Like the queerness that they are informed by, they are painted in a language of fluidity, complexity, and mutability. Yet, despite the sense of almost frenetic precarity with the figures are rendered, Forrester’s scenes resonate with certain calm and quietude. The Black queer women painted here repose in comfort: they lie in each other’s arms, lean on doorways, and lounge on staircases. Taken together, Forrester’s paintings orient us towards a world in which Black queer people cannot be neatly defined and delimited but instead revel in the sanctity of their quotidian being.
Forrester’s paintings are faceless, but they do not lack identities. In this suite of paintings, five figures in the artist’s intimate orbit recur: herself, her partner, her infant daughter, and two of her friends. For the artist and those in her close circle, the figures are instantly recognizable purely from their shape, outline, and affect. Yet at the same time, they are ambiguous enough that the viewer can imagine themselves slipping into their bodies and living in the scene. Her figures simultaneously index precise individuality and slippery amorphousness; they mark the intimacy that is particular to Forrester’s relational life while also making room for the viewer to be touched by their own sentiments of identification and recognition.
Instead of painting her worlds on conventional opaque materials like canvas or wood, the artist opts for polycarbonate, a clear, glass-like material often used in architectural construction. Given this unique material configuration, looking at Forrester’s paintings occasions looking through them. We can sneak into the intimacies that work within and behind the painting: the frame and its backing boards, the gallery walls, and the shadows that the paintings cast on them. In turn, the built environment of our own world bleeds into what’s happening in the imagined world of Forrester’s paintings; figures seem to step into our own dimension. The surfaces are windows, transparent openings that allow us to slither in and out of the paintings, making us intimately linked with the life unfolding on the surface.
Forrester’s figures float in realms of open possibility. As they emerge into their unfinished states of being against transparent ground, they invite the viewer to envision Black queer women beyond the entrapments of being easily resolved.
Excerpted text by writer and critic Zoë Hopkins
Image: Miranda Forrester, The Palazzo, 2023. Photo by Lucy Dawkins. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim.
The Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel is Lorraine O’Grady’s first exhibition with Mariane Ibrahim. It is also O’Grady’s first solo presentation to focus on the character of the Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel, her most recent artistic persona.
The Knight arrives 40 years after O’Grady’s earlier avatar, the renowned Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, confronted the prevailing racial segregation of the mainstream New York art world through unannounced performances at public art events. The Knight—together with attendants Pitchy-Patchy, her squire, and Rociavant, her horse—has set out to finish what her progenitor began. This time, however, the avatar’s identity is obscured. She wears a custom-forged suit of armor in the Early Renaissance style of the conquistadors, but its symbolic burden is subverted by the botanical Caribbean and other headdresses that alternately sprout from her barred burgonet helmet.
O’Grady has been gradually introducing the Knight to the public, beginning in 2021 with the landmark retrospective Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And at the Brooklyn Museum. In the museum’s European galleries, images of the Knight interacted with massive Rodin sculptures and with Early Renaissance paintings.
Later in 2021, at the height of the pandemic, O’Grady had herself filmed as the Knight doing a performance-without-audience in selected galleries of the Brooklyn Museum retrospective of her work. Under the watchful and approving gaze of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (invoked by a mannequin clothed in her iconic gown of white gloves nearby) the Knight declared her guiding concerns in the form of 9.5 theses. The edited footage became the “performance-film” Greetings & Theses which premiered at the museum later that year.
Although The Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel is young and surprisingly sexy work, it addresses multiple audiences separately and simultaneously. It poses a question that is fundamental to the problem of subjectivity and to the politics of visibility in Western modernity and artistic modernism: “If you conceal everything—race, class, age, gender—what is left? What is possible?”
The project amounts to a stunning recapitulation of the main conceptual and political ideas that have driven much of O’Grady’s work as an artist and cultural critic: an anti-hierarchical approach to difference within such binary categories as Black and White, self and other, West and non-West, and past and present. It furthers the artist’s long-standing interrogation of hybridity and multiplicity inscribed in the logic of “both/and,” a conceptual framework she has favored over the binary “either/or” logic inherent in Western philosophy.
While research and production for the Knight began in 2013, and weapons training and rehearsals began in 2017 and continue into the present, the persona was shaped, like most of O’Grady’s projects, by a near-constant reprisal and reassessment of prior works, ideas, and personal experiences. From the medieval armor collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which served as important touchstones for O’Grady as she began to conceive of the character and her attendants, to texts such as Howard Pyle’s illustrated novels of King Arthur’s court that she’d learned how to read as a 5-year-old and on to figures like Joan of Arc and Pallas Athena whom she later encountered at Girls Latin School in Boston, nothing escapes or is wasted. To develop the multiple headdresses worn by her persona, O’Grady spent two years studying contemporary carnivals of the Western Hemisphere before finally landing on a hand-colored lithograph in Isaac Mendes Belisario’s 1837 portfolio of Jonkonnu in Jamaica for inspiration.
The forthcoming exhibition will offer audiences their most intimate encounter with the Knight yet. The series of four “Announcement Cards” — cartes de visite-style photographic portraits of the Knight in full costume posing variously with sword and lance in hand—will be seen for the first time in a single, contiguous unit as intended by the artist. The four portraits, printed nearly at life size, are complex character studies. They introduce some of the Knight’s defining traits and behaviors and depict her in various stages of becoming, preparing to embark on a series of actions ranging from self-exploration to cultural critique. In addition, two “Family Portraits” — one formal, the other “real” — depict the Knight in relation to her companions. Rociavant is a toy wooden horse reminiscent of those in ancient European and Near Eastern folklore. The other, Pitchy-Patchy, her squire, is based on a combination of characters from Jamaica’s Jonkonnu Christmas festival, which O’Grady’s parents grew up with, as well as from the Wanaragua festival of Belize, where her maternal grandmother was born and raised before moving to Jamaica.
Accompanying the recent works will be a select number of earlier photomontage pieces which bring the artist’s vision for the Knight into conceptual and formal relief. The Fir-Palm, for instance, is a piece from 1991 that depicts a tree with a Caribbean palm trunk surmounted by New England fir foliage. The Caribbean trunk (torso) is sprouting from an African woman’s navel. O’Grady reverses this image in Announcement Card 1 (Banana-Palm with Lance), 2020, by depicting the Knight, whose body is encased in European armor, wearing a banana-palm headdress. The 2020 image of the Knight has thus inverted the symbolic position of the Caribbean, so it no longer occupies the space of the body but rather that of the mind. In the same way that many of O’Grady’s individual images from divergent periods function conceptually as diptychs, these two works seem to be O’Grady’s way of saying the intellect and the body can be both Western and non-Western, Northern and Southern, interchangeably, without gain or loss; that one can live equally on both sides. They appear to look forward to a time when such images will no longer have to be repeated.
Image: Lorraine O'Grady, Announcement Card 2 (Spike with Sword, Fighting), 2020, Fujiflex print, 60 x 40 in. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago, Paris, and Mexico City) © 2024 Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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FRIDAY, APRIL 12TH
FROM 5-8 PM
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Building upon the well-trodden ground of process-based abstraction, Kordich’s practice employs gesture and color as mediators between two vernaculars: one native to the canvas and another to time itself. Painting for Kordich is a performative process, a biographic choreography that engages her entire body in rhythmic creation. Her marks are loose, open, and characterized by a nonchalance that belies the intention and rhythmic focus of their author. Kordich’s picture planes exude a dense network of strokes and colors that intimate a nascent simmer of tension at each knotty juncture of paint.
Kordich’s work begins, like many things do, with herself. If one imagines the space of painting as irreducible to the terrain of canvas and extends to the space and time of its production, Kordich’s paintings become less of a discrete final object and more so selective records of a given time, frame of mind, and haptic occurrence. This density engenders a sense of immersion and sensory richness. Just as the dense foliage of a rainforest overwhelms the senses with its sights, sounds, and scents, Kordich's highly saturated and intricate works envelop the viewer in a tapestry of colors, shapes, and textures, stimulating contemplation.
Kordich’s work merges literary rigor and aesthetic sentiment, employing abstraction to connect physicality to the inner musings of the human psyche.Chaos converges into harmony through the interplay of tempo and color in her works, inviting viewers to embark on a journey of discovery.
Having originally studied architecture, Kordich’s work is perhaps best summed up as employing one of the most basic, yet difficult, things for any building to achieve: a question of how space is responsible for psychological responses. Coupled with a rigorous journaling practice, Kordich untangles her own musings about the universe, the self, and the invisible forces that shape our existence. Abstraction becomes a means to articulate these explorations without losing the sense of indeterminacy native to a thought’s earliest state of development. In doing so, she forges a symbiotic relationship between words and abstraction, transcending verbal limitations.
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Bethany Collins
McArthur Binion
Carmen Neely
Zohra Opoku
ruby onyinyechi amanze
Michael Rakowitz
Edra Soto
Present in different text-based cultures since antiquity, the notion of the palimpsest has fascinated conservators, historians, and artists through modern history. Through paintings, installations and sculptures, the show explores the way that history is built by competing layers of personal stories, social events, and notions of spirituality and myth, that manifest themselves either explicitly or symbolically in the practices of the presented artists.
Image: Handmadeness:four, 2023 © McArthur Binion. Courtesy the artist and GRAY, Chicago/New York
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In reflection of the rich sociologies of Jamaica, the centrality of mythology in Leasho Johnson’s work acknowledges the Caribbean and diasporic heritage to solidify history through folklore and imagination. Johnson’s practice situates imagination as an incubator for uninhibited connection and self-expression. Navigating the complexities of dark, abstract realms, his practice reveals sudden bursts of figuration, where creatures of presence emerge with striking clarity. By blending and experimenting with drawing and painting techniques, Johnson creates lush, vivid images brimming with sensual intensity.
Escaping the tyranny of meaning introduces a new body of work inspired by Anansi, the shapeshifting, clever character of West African folklore. Traditionally, Anansi is a spider used to explore moral tales from everyday dilemmas to irresolvable ethical conundrums. By invoking an abstracted form of Anansi, Johnson embraces anthropomorphism to underscore the importance of maintaining freedom within spaces of ambiguity and complexity. In the legacy of Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning, Johnson activates the visceral effects of the macabre to engage diasporic conversations on colonialism, visibility, and folklore as he liberates his figures from the constraints of direct representation or definition.
Image: Detail of 'The centipede under two skies (Anansi #27)', 2023. © Leasho Johnson.
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In an age of rapid advancement in virtual and augmented reality, Eva Jospin roots her practice in questioning perspective itself. In her tridimensional sculptures and immersive installations, she activates the illusion of depth to shift direct perception and guide the eye to multiple dimensions within each artwork, transforming sight into a conscious, interiorized process. As she explains, “I try to address the landscape as one we are part of—when nature becomes not just a space we observe but one we are inside of, it transforms into an interior, imagined vision.”
While the notion of linear perspective was first theorized in the 15th century by Leon Battista Alberti, Jospin’s practice expands this singularity. In Vanishing Points the artist underscores the impossibility of engaging in her work from a single viewpoint. This is formally evidenced in sculptural scenes that unveil their complexity when observed from varying angles, heights, and distances, conjuring a sense of immersion that evokes the presence and immediacy of a rich landscape that has not been flattened by representation. Enlivened through one’s imagination, the work is further heightened and lived as an internal experience.
Vanishing Points is a chapter in the artist’s ongoing inquiry into the observer’s connection to their natural and built environment—a dialogue with resonance to the architectural heritage of Chicago, making this exhibition a fitting debut in the city.
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The exhibition will be on view in tandem with the group exhibition Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica at the Art Institute Chicago, which includes Static Drift (2001), part of the museum's permanent collection.
ARTIST TALK:
SATURDAY, MARCH 8 I 4 PM
MODERATED BY LESLIE WILSON
ACADEMIC CURATOR AND DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH PROGRAMS
AT THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO
Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to present You Begin to See the Signs, the gallery’s third solo exhibition with artist duo Mwangi Hutter. Opening March 4, 2025, the show coincides with Panafrica Across Chicago, a citywide initiative organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, celebrating the depth and range of artistic practices from across the African continent and its diasporas.
With an oeuvre that spans performance, video, sound, photography and installation, You Begin to See the Signs marks a return to wood and stonework in Mwangi Hutter’s practice. Their current use of different typesofwood, limestone and granite reflects a focus on the cohesion of the four elements: earth, water, fire, and air – whose varied interactions birth distinct natural forms, each shaped by time and force. Attuned to these inherent rhythms and constraints of indigenous material, they approach creation as an act of listening and response, engaging both the body and the mind as they test the limits of strength and tension.
MWANGI HUTTER
YOU BEGIN TO SEE THE SIGNS
MARCH 4 - APRIL 16, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION:
SATURDAY, MARCH 8 I 5 - 7 PM
Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to present You Begin to See the Signs, the gallery’s third solo exhibition with artist duo Mwangi Hutter. Opening March 4, 2025, the show coincides with Panafrica Across Chicago, a citywide initiative organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, celebrating the depth and range of artistic practices from across the African continent and its diasporas.
With an oeuvre that spans performance, video, sound, photography and installation, You Begin to See the Signs marks a return to wood and stonework in Mwangi Hutter’s practice. Their current use of different typesofwood, limestone and granite reflects a focus on the cohesion of the four elements: earth, water, fire, and air – whose varied interactions birth distinct natural forms, each shaped by time and force. Attuned to these inherent rhythms and constraints of indigenous material, they approach creation as an act of listening and response, engaging both the body and the mind as they test the limits of strength and tension.
22 April - 31 May 2025
Chicago
Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to present Under the Flickering Light of the North Star, the gallery’s inaugural solo exhibition with Atlanta-based artist Michi Meko. On paper and canvas, his work layers tactile materials as narrative elements, taking the viewer from moments of stillness to bursts of action that explores the artist's contemplations on the legacies of critical geographies, particularly those of the American South.
Through his abstract landscape paintings, Meko guides audiences into the quiet anxieties of terrains that conjure ecological histories as wisdom. His brushstrokes map the dichotomies of rebellion and reflection through the contrasting use of a an imposing and often monumental dimly lit dusk, and the application of phosphorescent light and textural details that pop up from the canvas, as if offering a mediative look at the inherent tensions within landscapes.
Meko’s cartographic perspective, shaped by geographic storytelling, reveals the ecological memory embedded in the land, which informs and shapes his studio practice. His rebellious mark-making creates layered narratives of fugitivity and survival, where the American landscape serves as both a backdrop and a starting point for his examination of race, place, and memory. By limiting himself to five core materials, Meko forges a cohesive yet evolving dialogue that resounds Southern ingenuity to build density from minimalism. This constraint foregrounds the thesis of freedom and conflict between humans and nature, inviting the viewer to uncover oppositional textures and connections between the acrylic, aerosol, oil pastel, colored pencil, and gold leaf in each piece.
Meko’s material rolodex captures the speed and immediacy of his gestures. His proficiency in layering—overlaying materials that shift chemistries and reveal new textures and hues—enables the emergence of new forms based on the chronology of each layer.
The navigational syntax within You Good? Signal fire., 2024 is signature structure within Meko’s compositions. Drawing from the tradition of signal fires—used historically for urgent long-distance communication—Meko imbues these symbols with contemporary resonance. His marks are at once pragmatic and intuitive, building immense perceptual depth upon paper and canvas. These works invite introspection on the duality of the natural world, where the stillness of night awakens the horrors and histories that have shaped the land. Through these layers Meko builds upon an intergenerational vision, rooted in both contemporary and ancestral practices of escape and perseverance.
Michi Meko will open a solo exhibition at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art this August in Savannah, Georgia. Under the Flickering Light of the North Star will open on April 22 and continue through May 31, 2025.
Image: Michi Meko, The Big Mental Pause, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim.
A project by Mariane Ibrahim in collaboration with FUMI
On view APRIL 22 - MAY 3, 2025
Wednesday, April 23:
6 PM I Conversation with Gallery FUMI
5 - 7 PM I Reception (rsvp only)
Friday, April 25
After hours: Gallery opening until 8 PM
GALLERY FUMI PRESENTS:
JEREMY ANDERSON
SAELIA APARICIO
JAMESPLUMB
MAX LAMB
SAM ORLANDO MILLER
EELKO MOORER
JOHANNES NAGEL
SHINTA NAKAJIMA
KUSTAA SAKSI
LUKAS WEGWERTH
MARIANE IBRAHIM ARTISTS:
PETER UKA
DARRYL RICHARDSON
On the occasion of Expo Art week, we are pleased to announce Ad Libitum, a project by Mariane Ibrahim. Featuring the work of artists and designers exploring the themes of improvisation, and materiality, and on view from April 22 – May 3, 2025, the exhibition connects the works of Nigerian painter Peter Uka, special guests Mexico City-based photographer Darryl Richardson and London’s Gallery FUMI. Ad Libitum, or \"at one's pleasure\", will create a space of material experimentation.
\"Ad Libitum,\" meaning both “at one’s pleasure” and a musical call to improvisation, serves as a metaphor for the convergence of artists, designers, and friends of the gallery. The presentation unveils a celebration of friendship, collective spirit, craftmanship and cultural multiplicity.
Gallery FUMI marks its Chicago debut by presenting a curated selection of works from its designers and artists.
Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to present Thus masked, the world has a language, a group exhibition exploring the masquerade and mask traditions across the African diasporas in Mexico, the Caribbean, and the United States. Across the exhibition, masks are activated forms—a vessel through which truths can be expressed, history can be questioned, and memory can be reactivated. The exhibition will feature works by gallery artists Raphaël Barontini and Lorraine O’Grady, alongside invited artists Nick Cave, Ebony G. Patterson, Darryl Richardson, and Tavares Strachan.
Through lens-based practices, collage, and sculpture, the artists engage the performative, political, and intergenerational dimensions of masks that bridge geographies and social histories. As a threshold between the visible and the invisible, the archival and the contemporary, African diasporic masquerades are rituals that summon the essence of nature, from the bush and swamp to animals, spirits, foreigners, witches, the past itself, or ancestors —to allow spiritual presence to be embodied for communal and social transformation.
As masquerade culture spans between and beyond ritual, carnival, and street processions; ceremoniously the mask becomes a conduit: a threshold to the divine, a channel for the ancestral realm, or a vessel for collective memory. Darryl Richardson and Raphaël Barontini focus on the intersection of communal erasure and recovery, using partial concealment as a strategy to counter erasure and assert diasporic lineage. Their meditations on systemic erasure lead to Encourage from the Fambily series (2010) by Ebony G. Patterson, and sculpture by Nick Cave, that adorn figures whom transform the masked body into a site of reemergence and historical agency. Like Barontini, Tavares Strachan reclaims the archive through collage—but where Barontini gestures toward partial visibility, Strachan leans toward total concealment. Self Portrait: Loyalty to the Past (Blue Guro Mask) 2023, emphasizes loyalty to ancestral heritage while addressing the metaphysical complexities of identity and memory, making the mask a statement on resilience and continuity within the African diaspora.
Similar to traditional masks, Cave’s Soundsuits are constructed with everyday materials—twigs, sequins, fur, wire. These suits conceal the body entirely, freeing the wearer from assumptions tied to race, class, or gender. Within the context of masquerade, O’Grady’s concealment in Announcement (2020) becomes a vessel of deflection and power—resisting legibility while confronting the demands of visibility and representation. Both Cave and O’Grady activate concealment as a choreography of refusal and renewal.
In Thus masked, the world has a language, concealment is not absence—it is redirection, resistance, and transformation. From object to action, the mask’s power lies in its ability to be worn, danced, and inhabited—activating knowledge that is both embodied and inherited. As Lorraine O’Grady posits, through Announcement (2020), what truths emerge through concealment?
Thus masked, the world has a language, will be on view at Mariane Ibrahim Chicago until August 23, 2025.
Image: Tavares Strachan, Self Portrait: Loyalty to the Past (Blue Guro Mask), 2023. Photo by Miho Suzuki.
Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to announce Flaming Memory, a solo presentation of new works by Tokyo–based painter, Yukimasa Ida, whose portrait-based practice explores the tension between fleeting perception and the lasting imprint of memory on canvas.
Yukimasa Ida builds his paintings through decisive brushstrokes, layering matter onto the canvas to render faces, whether of people close to him or strangers encountered during his travels. These portraits simultaneously convey a sense of vulnerability, marked by the impossibility of truly confronting these figures face to face. At the same time, his recurrent use of red infuses the works with a contagious inner intensity. Imbued with memories of both near and distant presences, Yukimasa Ida’s work lingers in the viewer’s mind like the image of a glowing fire, at once magnetic and perilous. Through facial abstraction, Ida opens a perspective into the visceral depictions of the psyche. Each painting explores the subject's internal state, inviting viewers to confront the complexity of human experience.
The absence of distinction between foreground and background draws the eye to the subtle cues of face figuration: the curve of an ear or shadow of a lip, that anchors one's gaze. The artist’s charged color palette, built over a canvas primed with black, amplifies the somatic intensities of his sculptural oil impasto technique that holds the memory of knife marks and wet-on-wet blending. In this way, Ida’s canvases behave like skin—vulnerable to scars, erosion, and inscription. In Ida Yukimasa’s work, the canvas becomes mnemonic flesh, a surface that absorbs what perception cannot fully hold: emotion, disorientation, psychic residue. The power of his work lies in its contradiction: while the image dissolves; the material endures. It is the impossibility of permanence, where memory flickers and decays like a flame, yet everything leaves a trace.
Flaming Memory will be on view in Chicago from August 30 to October 25, 2025.
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The exhibition will run from November 14, 2025, to January 17, 2026, with an opening reception on Friday, November 14, 2025, from 6 - 8 PM.
","type":null,"state":"published","slug":"once-upon-a-midnight-dreary","created_at":"2025-11-16 17:31:15.442","updated_at":"2025-11-16 17:31:15.442","excerpt":"","is_timeless":true,"organization_id":165,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":"2025-11-14 18:00:00","opening_ends_at":"2025-11-14 20:00:00","searchable":"'14':135B,148B '17':139B '2025':136B,149B '2026':140B '6':151B '8':152B 'abstract':96B 'activ':95B 'artist':25B,32B 'ask':115B 'baudelair':81B 'blue':92B 'boukhenaïssi':27B,87B 'boundari':68B 'canvas':102B 'connect':63B 'contempl':61B 'dark':65B 'deep':91B 'dissolv':66B 'djabril':26B 'draw':74B 'dreari':5A,15B 'emerg':117B 'engrav':50B 'exhibit':18B,130B 'first':34B,43B 'french':24B 'french-artist':23B 'friday':146B 'galleri':46B 'give':124B 'illumin':100B 'imagin':114B 'includ':80B 'januari':138B 'literari':76B 'mark':30B 'mauv':94B 'max':85B 'medit':53B 'memori':112B 'midnight':4A,14B 'milner':86B 'moonlight':120B 'new':20B 'night':56B,107B 'novali':82B 'novemb':134B,147B 'opac':98B 'open':143B 'paint':52B 'palett':89B 'philosoph':78B 'pleas':8B 'pm':153B 'present':10B,36B,48B 'recept':144B 'refer':79B 'rilk':83B 'run':132B 'self':70B 'shadow':105B 'show':29B 'site':110B 'solo':17B,35B 'space':59B 'state':40B 'transform':103B 'unit':39B 'unseen':128B 'upon':2A,12B 'visibl':123B 'way':125B 'work':21B 'world':73B","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1763314268/mzd8hatkq7rcc4zzufi5.jpg","calendar":null,"carousel":false,"category_name":"Exhibitions"},{"id":24799,"title":"Once upon a midnight dreary Artist Talk","starts_at":"2025-11-15 14:00:00","ends_at":"2025-11-15 15:00:00","body":"On the occasion of Once upon a midnight dreary, please join us on Saturday, November 15 at 12 p.m for a conversation between French painter, Djabril Boukhenaïssi and Editor-in-Chief of Poetry magazine, Adrian Matejka.
Taking the exhibition as a point of departure, this conversation will explore Boukhenaïssi’s poetic investigations into the darkness of night as both subject and metaphor; reflecting on how the night, once a realm of mystery and imagination, has been eroded by modern light pollution and how this loss reshapes society.
","type":null,"state":"published","slug":"once-upon-a-midnight-dreary-artist-talk","created_at":"2025-11-12 18:13:04.573","updated_at":"2025-11-12 18:13:04.573","excerpt":"","is_timeless":false,"organization_id":165,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'12':25B '15':23B 'adrian':43B 'artist':6A 'boukhenaïssi':34B,57B 'chief':39B 'convers':29B,54B 'dark':63B 'departur':52B 'djabril':33B 'dreari':5A,16B 'editor':37B 'editor-in-chief':36B 'erod':85B 'exhibit':47B 'explor':56B 'french':31B 'imagin':82B 'investig':60B 'join':18B 'light':88B 'loss':93B 'magazin':42B 'matejka':44B 'metaphor':70B 'midnight':4A,15B 'modern':87B 'mysteri':80B 'night':65B,75B 'novemb':22B 'occas':10B 'p.m':26B 'painter':32B 'pleas':17B 'poetic':59B 'poetri':41B 'point':50B 'pollut':89B 'realm':78B 'reflect':71B 'reshap':94B 'saturday':21B 'societi':95B 'subject':68B 'take':45B 'talk':7A 'upon':2A,13B 'us':19B","thumbnail":"http://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1762970256/pXtY7kQzhliDec9ZvVSsoZWFx3MbFGSDkh5J_KzodeK36HMbH30jkM9ujhv8FDwLTH96XbTNu8tyij9YNxzZzESUjOLx7qEziK5RLWomeHm_NnWOC1w7DjAbGwfEtecAJpKd7Ul4pEJ80kz2U-NrV4WG3qGDtijgIWQ73XJmJM0_znlmme.jpg","calendar":null,"carousel":false,"category_name":"Talks"},{"id":26679,"title":"I Dream I Cross the River in One Stride","starts_at":"2026-02-13 17:00:00","ends_at":"2026-03-28 17:00:00","body":"Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to present I Dream I Cross the River in One Stride, a group exhibition bringing together the work of Clémence Gbonon (b. 1994), Brittney Leeanne Williams (b. 1990), and Autumn Wallace (b. 1996).
The exhibition is inspired by ideas explored in Lorraine O’Grady’s seminal essay Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity. If, as O’Grady argues, the Black female body has long functioned as the unseen reverse side of Western femininity—present as stereotype, absent as subject—these artists reclaim the right to produce images that are self-authored, multiple, and unafraid of excess. Across painting and sculpture, Gbonon, Williams, and Wallace refuse inherited dichotomies and instead inhabit what O’Grady calls a “both/and” space: sensuous and thoughtful, wild and monumental, intimate and vulnerable, queer and undefined.
Presented together, these artists do more than correct an art-historical omission; they propose a contemporary grammar for seeing and feeling lived experience. In dialogue with O’Grady’s text, the exhibition suggests that reclaiming female subjectivity today means moving beyond rescue from the male gaze toward a more radical act: freeing these figures from the historic script altogether. Here, the artworks become sites of self-knowledge, contradiction, pleasure—spaces where the right to complexity is not negotiated but asserted.
Image: Brittney Leeanne Williams, Interruption 7, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Berggruen, NY.
","type":null,"state":"published","slug":"i-dream-i-cross-the-river-in-one-stride","created_at":"2026-02-12 17:31:24.971","updated_at":"2026-02-12 17:31:24.972","excerpt":"","is_timeless":true,"organization_id":165,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":"2026-02-13 18:00:00","opening_ends_at":"2026-02-13 20:00:00","searchable":"'1990':41B '1994':36B '1996':46B '2024':233B '7':232B 'absent':91B 'across':112B 'act':196B 'alexand':239B 'altogeth':204B 'argu':72B 'art':155B 'art-histor':154B 'artist':95B,148B,237B 'artwork':207B 'assert':226B 'author':106B 'autumn':43B 'b':35B,40B,45B 'becom':208B 'berggruen':240B 'beyond':186B 'black':65B,74B 'bodi':76B 'both/and':131B 'bring':28B 'brittney':37B,228B 'call':129B 'clémenc':33B 'complex':221B 'contemporari':161B 'contradict':214B 'correct':152B 'courtesi':234B 'cross':4A,19B 'dialogu':170B 'dichotomi':122B 'dream':2A,17B 'essay':60B 'excess':111B 'exhibit':27B,48B,177B 'experi':168B 'explor':53B 'feel':166B 'femal':66B,75B,181B 'feminin':87B 'figur':199B 'free':197B 'function':79B 'gaze':191B 'gbonon':34B,116B 'gradi':57B,71B,128B,173B 'grammar':162B 'group':26B 'histor':156B,202B 'ibrahim':11B 'idea':52B 'imag':101B,227B 'inhabit':125B 'inherit':121B 'inspir':50B 'instead':124B 'interrupt':231B 'intim':139B 'knowledg':213B 'leeann':38B,229B 'live':167B 'long':78B 'lorrain':55B 'maid':63B 'male':190B 'marian':10B 'mean':184B 'monument':138B 'move':185B 'multipl':107B 'negoti':224B 'ny':241B 'o':56B,70B,127B,172B 'olympia':61B 'omiss':157B 'one':8A,23B 'paint':113B 'pleas':13B 'pleasur':215B 'present':15B,88B,145B 'produc':100B 'propos':159B 'queer':142B 'radic':195B 'reclaim':64B,96B,180B 'refus':120B 'rescu':187B 'revers':83B 'right':98B,219B 'river':6A,21B 'script':203B 'sculptur':115B 'see':164B 'self':105B,212B 'self-author':104B 'self-knowledg':211B 'semin':59B 'sensuous':133B 'side':84B 'site':209B 'space':132B,216B 'stereotyp':90B 'stride':9A,24B 'subject':67B,93B,182B 'suggest':178B 'text':175B 'thought':135B 'today':183B 'togeth':29B,146B 'toward':192B 'unafraid':109B 'undefin':144B 'unseen':82B 'vulner':141B 'wallac':44B,119B 'western':86B 'wild':136B 'william':39B,117B,230B 'work':31B","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1770917324/efn7ckdxj2y0ovuop1ur.jpg","calendar":null,"carousel":false,"category_name":"Exhibitions"},{"id":29682,"title":"Youssef Nabil: No One Knows But the Sky","starts_at":"2026-04-08 17:37:17.918","ends_at":"2026-05-23 17:37:17.919","body":"Mariane Ibrahim is proud to present its first solo exhibition with Youssef Nabil, No one Knows but the Sky.
Cinema forms the stage upon which the photographic and video work of Youssef Nabil unfolds. Within it, the history of Egyptian cinema coexists with his childhood memories of Cairo, shaped by the film posters of a country that remains a major center of popular culture. Through its images, sounds, and stories, Egyptian cinema has shaped tastes, morals, and even language across the Arab world for decades. Through cinema, Nabil encountered art for the first time, and it remains the lens through which he has continued to observe and register the many transformations of his native land.
The artworks presented in this exhibition—one of which gives the exhibition its title, and where the video The Room is shown for the first time—offer a glimpse into the last twenty years of the artist’s practice, where his stylized films move alongside hand-colored images. In these pieces, Nabil applies a meticulous process of painting directly onto the print, transforming each work into a unique object, in the tradition of the Egyptian film posters of his youth.
Image: Youssef Nabil, Self-portrait with Roots, Los Angeles, 2008. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim.
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Returning to the city where she received her MFA in painting in 1999, Rochlin approaches The Horizon Keeps Moving as both a form of return and excavation. The works are shaped by layered impressions of Chicago—its lakefront horizon, the river, its architectural density, and its more intimate geographies of bars, alleys, and domestic thresholds. These elements surface as sculpted anecdotes across ceramic forms, where drawing and surface function as extensions of thought. In this context, the city operates not simply as backdrop but as a structuring logic—one through which memory, subjectivity, and narrative are continuously reassembled.
Jennifer Rochlin (b. 1968 in Baltimore, Maryland; lives and works in Altadena, CA) received her MFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999. Later moving to the west coast, an unexpected opportunity teaching ceramics at an all-girls Catholic high school prompted her first experiments with clay. Largely self-taught in the medium, vessels eventually became central to her practice.
Rochlin builds terracotta pots through coil and slab construction, through which the imperfect marks of the artist’s hand are left imprinted on the surface of the clay. The sculptures are engraved with sgraffito techniquesand take on unusual shapes, where imagery moves fluidly across portraiture, politics, art history, and floral patterns, oscillating between personal and collective vignettes.
Image: Jennifer Rochlin, Spring in Chicago with Georgia O’Keefe Clouds, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim.
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George Clinton remains one of the most unfailingly eccentric figures in the history of music, renowned for extravagant performances in which stage production and sonic production are used to psychedelically transport his viewers. As ambitious as it was improbable, the Mothership – a silver, pyramid-shaped vessel that landed on-stage with Clinton himself as Dr. Funkenstein on board – captured the imagination of Parliament’s audiences by bringing psychedelic culture into the mainstream at a moment when the space race remained an ongoing cultural obsession.Drawing from an eclectic constellation of references, Clinton's paintings construct dreamlike worlds in which the logic of a non-narrative typology gives way to rhythm and vibration. Across the canvases, void-like forms recalling the silhouette of the Mothership hover at the center of the picture plane. Untethered from ground or horizon, these suspended forms occupy indeterminate fields where space is rendered not as empty expanse but as a living, psychic terrain in which possibility continuously circulates.
Across the paintings, Clinton deploys a vivid palette of electric pinks, saturated blues, and radiant yellows that has become synonymous with the visual culture surrounding Parliament-Funkadelic and its Afrofuturist imagination. Suggestive of celestial atmospheres and synthetic light, these colors transform pictorial space into an environment of continual emergence. Together with the recurring form of the Mothership, they produce a visual language in which cosmic travel becomes synonymous to Clinton’s music and performances.
Image: George Clinton, Ethereal De-cloaking, 2023. Courtesy of George Clinton.
![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1785440129/ssgaewgcbhqasjnyez9k.png\")
Artist Portrait of George Clinton. Photo by Lynsey Weatherspoon, Redux. Courtesy of George Clinton.