Arthur Jafa, the filmmaker, artist, and cinematographer feted for his explorations of Blackness in America, has signed with Sprüth Magers. Jafa’s first exhibition with Sprüth Magers opens tomorrow in Los Angeles. He will continue to be represented by the New York–based Gladstone Gallery.
“We are very happy to be working with Arthur Jafa,” Monika Sprüth said in a statement ARTnews. “His multidisciplinary approach to image-making, and his work’s strong conceptual roots, are very much in keeping with artists of the gallery, from John Baldessari, Jenny Holzer, and Rosemarie Trockel to younger generations such as Cao Fei, Anne Imhof, and Martine Syms.”
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For the past 30 years, the Mississippi-born artist has been remixing and reimagining sonic and visual artifacts that he has amassed. He won international acclaim with the 2016 film Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death, which consists of spliced-together clips from police body cameras, broadcast segments, civil rights demonstrations, basketball games, and concerts, all set to Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam”. The film, like much of his oeuvre, presents a complex portrait of Black joy and pain. In 2020, when the country was violently, defiantly divided over the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, 13 museums screened the film for 48 hours.
Jafa won the 2019 Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for The White Album (2018), a 30-minute collage of found and personal footage that explores Black-white relations which, per his message, can even at their best be awkward—and at their worst, deadly. “Just as the film critiques a moment fraught with violence, in tenderly portraying the artist’s friends and family, it also speaks to our capacity for love,” the jury wrote.
For his upcoming exhibition with Sprüth Magers, titled “nativemanson”, the artist will present his newest film, BG (2024), which reimagines pivotal scenes in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, as well as other recent works across disciplines. (BG previously went under a different name when it first appeared earlier this year at Gladstone, where it polarized critics.)
“We have been following AJ’s work for many years and are continually astounded at his ability to poignantly distill so many visual, historical and theoretical elements into his practice,” Philomene Magers said in a statement to ARTnews. “We look forward to supporting his future projects internationally, beginning with this important exhibition in the city where he has lived and worked for so many years.”