The floras were forms of memorials as opposed to memories, of Black bodies (and souls) whose lives were too often scraped of life at the hands of police forces and the persistent vagaries of violent misuses of power.” Hollowed of orthodox painterly beauty, they seemed to be weeping, bursting at the seams with melancholy. “In Packer’s first major survey exhibition, at the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society in 2017, life-size paintings of flowers sat unsettled, inanimate residues of pain. “For a career-defining exhibition held at the Serpentine Gallery in 2021, Packer chose the title The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing, a provocation as much as an outline of the myriad ways the artist seeks to interrogate the customary forms and binary expectations of the human gaze and its relationship to historical painting,” explains Omar Kholief in Prime. Jennifer Packer, A Lesson in Longing, 2019Ī more nuanced and difficult view of the world is offered elsewhere in Prime, in the queer American painter, Jennifer Packer’s works. As if articulating exhibitionism and antivoyeurism, Sepuya teases the regime of visibility, creating images that seem to perform for us while simultaneously resisting our gaze.” The artist arranges these elements in such a way that, in the resulting compositions, they seem to intertwine, pierce, bend, kink, interrupt, and reemerge in surprising ways. “Most of Sepuya’s photographs are taken in his own studio, showing relationships between the artist, his friends and lovers, simple pieces of furniture, and traces of everyday activities alongside his characteristic mirrors, cameras, tripods, and backdrops. Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Darkroom Mirror (0X5A0752), 2019 “Breaking with the most common conventions surrounding the practice of portraiture, the language developed by this artist highlights the capacities and limits of visuality, summoning the whole body to engage with the intimacy and eroticism of his images. “Manipulating mirrors and lenses, Sepuya points out escape routes from the empire of vision,” explains Bernado Mosqueira in our new book. Consider the photography of Paul Mpagi Sepuya, who combines eroticism with intimacy and communitarianism. It’s a succinct way to show the changing nature of queer politics and experience – and one echoed by many of the artists in Prime: Art’s Next Generation.Īll of these 107 artists were born after 1980, and are creating works to respond to a world quite different from the one Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol or Agnes Martin worked within. Some are favouring a new version of the familiar rainbow ensign, called the Pride Progress Flag, created by the American designer Daniel Quasar in 2018, which adds coloured chevrons to the left edge, to celebrate, and call for, greater diversity in the LGBTQ community. You may notice a small difference during Pride Month this year. Get a fresh view of queer art, aesthetics and politics via our contemporary art survey ![]() Louis Fratino, Tom at Riis Beach wearing my underwear around his neck, 2019 A Prime view of Pride
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