New Flower | Images of the Reclining Venus

The FLAG Art Foundation presents Awol Erizku: New Flower | Images of the Reclining Venus from September 17 – December 12, 2015, on FLAG’s 10^th floor gallery. The exhibition marks the first presentation of the artist’s series of photographs taken in Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis Ababa in 2013. This compelling body of portraiture challenges the mythologized art historical role of the Venus and the odalisque[1] in Western painting, setting these tropes against the reality of one of the largest concentrations of sex workers in Africa.[2]

A ‘Conceptual Mixtape’ by Erizku, produced in collaboration with Los Angeles-based DJ SOSUPERSAM, plays throughout New Flower | Images of the Reclining Venus, featuring music and soundbites from Kerry James Marshall’s “Elson Lecture: Kerry James Marshall: The Importance of Being Figurative” at the National Gallery of Art, expanding on the ideas of the exhibitions.

Awol Erizku has created several bodies of work re-contextualizing iconic art historical images through his cross-disciplinary approach to sculpture, photography, music, video installation, and social media channels, to discuss identity and the politics of representation. Erizku states “Growing up going to the MoMA or the Met, and not seeing enough people of color (in the art or in the museum)…I felt that there was something missing. So when I was ready to make work as art, I wanted to comment and critique the art history, and make art that reflected the environment I grew up around…”

The exhibition’s title New Flower is the English translation of Addis Ababa, where Erizku created the series, made possible by the Alice Kimball Fellowship Award from Yale University, where he received his MFA. In New Flower | Images of the Reclining Venus, Erizku sought to create “a new reclining Venus, one with darker skin” that dismisses the mythologizing of the Venus and the romanticism of the odalisque featured in Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque (1814) and Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863). [3]

In an effort to create a more realistic and contemporary odalisque, Manet painted “a lower-class girl rather than a goddess, a prostitute rather than a courtesan, Olympia’s status was uncompromisingly degenerate, albeit heroically rehabilitated through modernism.”[4] Similarly, Erizku wanted to represent the reality of prostitution, and asked each of his subjects (sex-workers paid to sit for him) to reinterpret the poses of the renowned paintings by Ingres and Manet. Gone are the opulent and idealized settings; each woman in New Flower is photographed in the beds of anonymous hotel rooms across Addis Ababa, staring directly at viewers, challenging our gaze as did previous depictions of Venus. In Erizku’s portraits, the peripheral black servant is now Venus, front and center but alone, stripped of everything but her self-preservation in these narrow circumstances.

Coinciding with the exhibition at FLAG, Erizku will also present a solo exhibition of new sculpture and painting, Bad II the Bone, at a roaming space the artist titled Duchamp Detox Clinic, in downtown Los Angeles, CA.