MUST-SEE SHOWS AT BLUE-CHIP GALLERIES YOU CAN VIEW ONLINE

Artsy Editors

Frida Orupabo, installation view of “12 self portraits” at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, 2020. Photo by Roberto Apa. Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York/Rome.

While galleries have temporarily closed worldwide due to COVID-19, we can still be inspired by the work of contemporary artists. As part of Artsy’s Art Keeps Going campaign, we’re exploring shows that have been impacted by art spaces going dark. Every week, we’re featuring five exhibitions that you can access via Artsy, with insights from the artists and our writers. This week, we’re sharing a selection of fresh work at blue-chip galleries from Rome to Mexico City.

Frida Orupabo, installation view of “12 self portraits” at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Rome, 2020. Photo by Roberto Apa. Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York/Rome.

Frida Orupabo, installation view of “12 self portraits” at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Rome, 2020. Photo by Roberto Apa. Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York/Rome.

The title of Frida Orupabo’s show at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, “12 self portraits,” is an intentional misnomer—the sculptural collages that populate the Roman gallery space are not self-portraits, but sourced from an extensive archive of historical photographs. “I don’t use images of me in my collages,” the artist explained in a video on the gallery’s site. “I use other people, but I break it up.”

That “breaking up” adds another wrinkle to the show’s title. The works here are intentionally fractured, featuring relocated and recombined aspects of the body; there is hardly a concrete “self” in sight. While almost all of the works feature the faces of black women, the bodies those faces are attached to range from childish or cherubic figures to pure sculptural forms, obelisks, barbells, or ominous crossbones.

Frida Orupabo

The sense of decapitation permeates and becomes something deeper, a sort of truncated and repossessed history felt in both the form of the sculptures as well as their placement, from the fresco-like wall hangings to the totemic floor pieces, scattered like the pilfered treasures of a tomb. Questions of racial and colonial violence intermingle with questions of a more metaphysical bent. Is the self one thing, or is it recombinant? Is it free-floating or rooted in place? More pointedly—how is selfhood granted to the original subjects of these sculptures, separated as they are from their bodies and their past? Are the works portraits, or are they possessions?

—Justin Kamp………………

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