Eugene Ofori Agyei navigates international boundaries with the energy and easy grace of an accomplished athlete or dancer. But through works such as Complex Journey, he shows us that his migration from Ghana to the United States has not been devoid of psychological and emotional trials. Back home in Ghana he is known by his ethnic group, Akan. On the African continent he is seen as Ghanaian. And in America he is seen as a Black man and a foreigner. Agyei continues to define and meld his various personal and artistic identities. Share his journey through space and time as you navigate this immersive Kudos Shed installation.
The goal of this email is to introduce you to the career of an artist whose work prices have plummeted to 10% on the dollar from less than a decade ago as seen in a recent auction I attended which included the artist’s work.
“To designate this new figure of the artist, I have coined the term semionaut: creator of paths within a landscape of signs. Inhabitants of a fragmented world, where objects and shapes abandon the cradle of their original culture to spread across the global space, wandering in search of connections to establish.”
Nicolas Bourriaud
Traditionally, we have defined an artist as one who does something and expresses themselves through material and immaterial forms. That something holds aesthetic and communicative capabilities that can be recognized by individuals and validated within the institutional art world.
“A good gallerist is one who takes a risk for an artist because it shows that he trusts the artist’s work.”
Art gallery management
The encounter between artist and gallerist usually occurs in formal and informal settings. A mutual attraction emerges between them, based on the gallerist’s profile and the type of artistic production they promote and market. It should be clear that the gallerist’s profession serves as an essential bridge between artists, collectors, and the public while also possessing a keen understanding of the artistic tastes of their time, a creative time that, in the 21st century, manifests itself amidst a remarkable eclecticism in which “(…) artists dedicated to a single expressive vein are increasingly rare, making a disparate set of disciplines essential to approach them”¹. The contemporary artist is increasingly multifaceted, embodying the multiplicity of artistic trends through techniques, materials, and signifiers that reflect our globalized reality
“Gallerists who show contemporary art, who represent a group of artists they believe in (or whose work inspires faith in them), engage in the considerable professional and financial risks involved in welcoming new works, particularly those of a controversial nature.”
The Queen of Night, an assemblage made in the year 2023, presents a conjunction of signifying elements in my body of work that come from tasks traditionally defined as feminine, performed within the context of private life and expressed through laboring with threads, embroidery, fabrics, lace and other materials capable of being transformed into narratives of women, their context and their matriarchal power as producers of meaning and micro-stories.
We want to tribute the incredible artist Frank Stella, who passed away recently, by sharing 5 things you didn’t know about Frank Stella.
Charles O. Perry (1922-2011) was a prolific sculptor who sought to explore paradoxes and enigmas posed by science through art. In this serious journey, he expressed scientific ideas and created a body of work highly influenced by mathematics. In doing so, Perry became recognized internationally for over one hundred public art commissions throughout the United States, Japan, Australia, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia.
“There are also letters on the spine of each book; these letters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say. I know that such a lack of relevance, at one time seemed mysterious…”
Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel
In my paintings, the world is turned into a place that is slightly more mysterious and evocative than a naturalistic landscape, as it is intended to celebrate the oddity within it.
Jena Thomas
