Gagosian is pleased to present Ancestral Figure, a convergence of four artists—Walker Evans, Sherrie Levine, Roe Ethridge, and Mark Grotjahn—in their respective responses to the ritual object as inspiration, referent, index, and collectible of mysterious allure.
The title is from a photograph by Walker Evans. Ancestral figure [Reliquary figure] is one image among the hundreds that comprise the vast educational portfolio that Alfred H. Barr, Jr., commissioned to document the groundbreaking exhibition African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art in 1935. The exhibition brought together an unprecedented number of African sculptures from institutional and private collections and is said to have engendered the Western canon of African art. For Evans it was a turning point in his career.
Evans’s project helped form the aesthetic criteria and the method by which African art was studied for decades. So seamlessly did he link the diverse subjects to his detailed and powerful representations of them that the status of the photographs as photographs was minimized, and subsequently they were viewed more as surrogates for the sculptures themselves. Probing the relationship thus established between the original object of ritual and its aesthetic corollary, Levine, Ethridge and Grotjahn seek to locate the flashpoint at which the art-historical, anthropological or sociological realities of the original artifact end, and a new independent vision begins.
In the Makonde Body Masks, Sherrie Levine blatantly transforms social and cultural function into pure aesthetic value. These distinctive body masks, which represent the torsos of pregnant women, are a stunning cultural paradox used by pubescent boys to enact the rite de passage from childhood to adulthood. By casting this highly collectible tribal artifact in gleaming bronze, she simultaneously doubles and collapses its impact as cultural fetish in the most traditional syntax of contemporary sculpture.
