De Buck Gallery is delighted to present a capsule of recent and iconic works by artist Zak Ové.
Zak Ové creates sculpture, painting, film and photography that draws on his upbringing in London and Trinidad. His work is informed by the history and lore carried through the African diaspora to the Caribbean, Britain and beyond with particular focus on traditions of masking and masquerade as a tool of self-emancipation.
Held in private and institutional collections globally, Ové’s work has most recently been shown at The Bunker, Beth Rudin De Woody’s private exhibition space in West Palm Beach, in a show curated by leading museum directors Thelma Golden (the Studio Museum in Harlem) and Anne Pasternak (the Brooklyn Museum).
This selection of works comprises recent doily works as well as a sculptural work from his renowned Car Masks series as well as individual selections from his celebrated and well-traveled installation Black and Blue. The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness.
The Car Mask
Masks are a through-line in Ové’s work and Rumplesteelskin, 2017, a haunting yet playful assemblage of car parts into a brightly colored visage, is an example of his practice of reinterpreting the art and cultural tradition of African mask-making. This work is from a series that Ové calls Car Masks, monumental works composed of vintage car parts that have been colorfully painted. This series explores how artists can follow up on the mask-making convention to document the contemporary experience. It is Ové’s version of the African or African diaspora sculpture “without recourse to ebony wood.” Per the artist, there are “negative colonial connotations” associated with ebony, such that it is “looked down upon and seen as coming from a naïve outsider culture.” In his attempt to explode the tradition and the connotations, Ové uses fresh materials, such a bonnet, doors and grille from the UK’s classic vehicle, the Morris Minor. Ové has used parts from the Morris Minor to great effect before with his futuristic totemic sculpture Autonomous Morris.
The Doily Works
The doily works are a signature part of Ové’s practice. They explode in dizzying, geometric abstractions. Ové likens the development of his compositions to a coral reef. The process builds organically, as he layers and adds found and collected doilies in radiating patterns, creating a balance between light and dark as well as a combination of textural values. The process is playful and rhythmic, resulting in colorful abstractions that carry the viewer’s eye around the works as though they were alive and moving.
Some of the doily works in this presentation were created in homage to writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin, who was an artistic mentor to Ové. These works, such as Giovanni’s Room, Another Country, and The Fire Next Time reference and take their titles from works by Baldwin.
“For me the destruction of self that [Baldwin] refers to is the same destruction that the free slaves fought against in Canboulay (the precursor to Carnival), in Trinidad,” said Ové noting another subject that he has worked with. “The right to live a life with the same justice and equality that the Black man’s white counterpart was provided with.”
Black and Blue. The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness
Perhaps most recognizable among Zak Ové’s works is Black and Blue. The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness, an installation originally made for Somerset House in London where it debuted in 2017 and comprising a phalanx of 40 graphite figures arranged in military-like formation. The complete installation has also been staged at the B. Gerald Cantor Sculpture Garden at LACMA, San Francisco Civic Centre Plaza, and Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the UK.
The work is a rebuke to The Masque of Blackness, a Jacobean-era play written in 1605 by Ben Jonson for Queen Anne of Denmark in which the masquers, appearing in blackface makeup, were to be disguised as Africans and were to be “cleansed” of their blackness by King James.
The work references two milestones in Black history. The Jonson play was the first stage production to use blackface make-up, and Invisible Man is another literary reference, to Ralph Ellison’s novel, the first by an African American to win the National Book Award.
As with much of Ové’s work, this one also takes inspiration from Caribbean Carnival, a celebration that is rooted in Mardi Gras festivities of the French colonists of the region and Canboulay, a similar event through which enslaved people expressed themselves with music and costume and honored their African traditions. The figures stand tall signifying the stance historically admired by Western men, according to Ové, as well as the resilience of the African diaspora.
This work is conceived as an installation but also comprises individual sculpture.
