David Castillo Gallery is proud to present Sanford Biggers’ Quadri ed Angeli, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition is focused on new quilt paintings and sculptural quilts.
A multi-disciplinary artist, Biggers’ antique quilts feature in his practice as a lexicon of layered histories and symbols that examine the history of the United States and its legacy of enslavement and social inequity as well as sacred geometry, sampling and Buddhist Thangkas. The artist approaches these quilts as a collaborator with their original makers, reconfiguring materials to be cut, recombined, painted or collaged into repeating visual references. His quilt works are imbued with a mixture of recognizable imagery of constellation patterns or tree root systems alongside subtle silhouettes, symbols and gestures that could serve as navigation markers or imply (dis)embodied entities. Afro-futurism inflects these works with motifs of survival and transcendence. To this end, Biggers frames his exploration of these histories through the idea that “Harriet Tubman was an astronaut” for her role in leading enslaved peoples from “the south to the north by navigating the stars.”
In Quadri ed Angeli, Biggers reveals his deeper artistic vision by accumulating meaning in a tight choreography between visual references, connecting threads which reveal the affinities between seemingly disparate peoples, regions and times as they unravel from the past to the present and beyond.
Sanford Biggers was born (1970) and raised in Los Angeles, and currently lives and works in New York. He was awarded the 2017 Rome Prize in Visual Arts. He has had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2018), the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2016), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2012) and the Brooklyn Museum (2011), among many others. His work has been shown in important institutional group exhibitions including the Menil Collection (2008) and the Tate Modern (2007), as well as recent exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017) and the Barnes Foundation (2017). Biggers’ work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among others. His work is also included in major international private and corporate collections such as UBS. Sanford Biggers’ work has been the subject of nearly twenty museum group and solo exhibitions in 2019, including ICA Boston, Tufts University, Phillips Collection (D.C.), Stanford University, American Academy in Rome and numerous others.
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