Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to present Perpetual Portrait, a group exhibition featuring the work of thirty artists drawn both from and outside the gallery’s program who engage in notions of portraiture. Focusing on artists who have made the portrait a central part of their practice, the exhibition will span all three galleries and will be on view from July 8 to August 18. It brings together a multitude of approaches and perspectives by artists from different generations and cultural perspectives to situate our understanding of the genre into a new and complex framework. While cross references abound, several themes resonate throughout the exhibition and show how the portrait is used: as self-reflection, as a symbol, as a trigger, and as a tool to address larger societal and historical issues.

Participating artists include Laura Aguilar, Andrea Bowers, Ever Baldwin, Ellen Berkenblit, Sadie Benning, Sara Berman, Kwesi Botchway, Brian Calvin, Kim Dingle, Nicole Eisenman, Luis Flores, Nash Glynn, Genevieve Gaignard, Roger-Edgar Gillet, Salomon Huerta, Lavaughan Jenkins, Karl Haendel, Raffi Kalenderian, Nate Lewis, Helina Metaferia, Celia Paul, Pope.L, Tatiana Preciado, Robert Pruitt, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Amy Sillman, John Sonsini, Nicola Tyson, Hannah van Bart, Monique Van Genderen, and Esther Pearl Watson.

Installation photo credit: Brica Wilcox

Nicole Eisenman’s monumental sculpture entitled Perpetual Motion Machine inspired the exhibition’s focus. First featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, the bronze depicts the artist as a larger-than-life figure perpetually moving a paint stick from which tuna fish cans jangle, a gesture that both expresses the perpetual labor of an artist or, on a more fundamental level, the ever repetitive struggle of every-day life. Situating themselves into a European male dominated history, Eisenman condenses notions of labor and futility, struggle and pleasure, tediousness and hope into a powerful figure that is both rooted in the past and leads to the future. Luis Flores is recognized for his ongoing series of hand-crocheted, life-sized sculptures of himself theatrically staged in various poses and dressed in blue jeans rolled at the cuff, a navy blue crew neck t-shirt, and blue Vans. In the exhibition, his “soft” self-portrait in an impossibly still and permanent one handed “push-up” pose offers a poetic juxtaposition to the hardness and solidity of Eisenman’s bronze and the perpetual motion of their arm. Tackling constructs of masculinity, Nash Glynn presents nude self-portraits and imagines the architectural space created within the expanse of the canvas as a space her body can rightfully inhabit. In the painting entitled Night, she has removed architectural boundaries all together, letting the glowing pink tones of her body radiate against the darker hues of the evening sky.

By photographing her nude body in nature–in the wild, expansive and undisturbed landscapes of the desert– Laura Aguilar highlighted her identity as a large-bodied, working-class queer Chicana woman and initiated conversations about the body, equity, and representation long before these themes became central to our current moment. Nicola Tyson portrays the often-abstracted embodiment of the female form—frequently herself—in bold applications of primary colors that suggest the vulnerability and strangeness of the physical body. Her forceful and dramatic figures often cross the boundaries into the natural world as she fuses human, plant, and animal features into mythic hybrid beings of great expression, humor, and strength. Tatiana Preciado’s self-portrait is inspired by biblical narratives, particularly the stories of saints who mirror the dynamics of sado-masochistic relationships. Her work reflects her grappling with conflicting emotions revolving around her identity as a queer Mexican American woman who was raised Catholic.

In what she calls “imaginary portraits,” Hannah Van Bart explores atmospheric effects of light and color through figurative imagery to reproduce a specific sensation of felt experience. The various characters she invents feel like members of a large family related to the artist and display a nuanced lexicon of beautifully rendered emotions through light and paint. Celia Paul, who spent the formative years of her life posing for a well-known artist many years her senior, has created an expansive body of repetitive and unflinching self-portraits in which her frank and uncompromising gaze back at the viewer is surrounded by a sea of glorious light and color. In the exhibition she presents herself seated in a bare room on her bed as if floating on a green sea of shimmering water. A beautifully rendered expanse of turquoise and green ripples of water fills the large canvas of Ghanaian artist Kwesi Botchway’s new painting in the exhibition. Entitled Swimming Lesson, the work depicts two people engaged in a moment of joy and support, expressing the artist’s intent to evoke positive, self-affirming images of the black body. In this portrayal of leisure and relaxation, the artist not only offers a counter image to the idea of the laboring and suffering artist but encourages participation in pleasures historically denied to the black body.

Known for visually dense and highly patterned portraits imbued with a potent psychological charge, Raffi Kalenderian’s new painting Chris Odili-Obi (Before the Moon Falls) depicts his friend in an elaborate living room surrounded by sumptuous details, thickly laid paint, and vivid color. Here, the figure triggers a joyful exploration of paint which is thickly lathered, spackled, brushed, and sculpted onto the canvas to create a powerful aura round the depicted subject. Brian Calvin’s portraits similarly revel in the joyfulness of color, but its application is strictly two dimensional and the expression of his subjects emerges from the exuberant exaggerations of their features into a much more abstracted territory. Taking this approach into a different direction are the portraits of the late Roger-Edgar Gillet, whose brilliant earth-toned brushstrokes have turned images of faces into abstracted apparitions akin to uncanny masks or ghosts.

Throughout the exhibition the artists suggest numerous perspectives on the potential for portraiture to convey larger cultural issues. Andrea Bowers’ intensely detailed pencil drawing taken from an image of a 2015 worker’s rights march for the right to a minimum wage is a heart-breaking document to the perpetual struggle to grant workers a living wage and dignified working conditions. Genevieve Gaignard’s work often retools found imagery from the 19th and 20th centuries that have perpetuated racist stereotypes as a way to relinquish and redefine their symbolic meaning. Gaignard’s collage, And Still We Bloom: Fields of Joy, is part of the artist’s “And Still We Bloom” series that transforms imagery of the mammy figure into a potent symbol of cultural strength. The ubiquitous image of the mammy is no longer a household object but instead a vessel that blossoms with an arrangement of flowers and adorned with an array of Black and Brown faces–the collages embodying the enduring spirit of Black women as vessels of growth and unshackling.

In labor-intensive, photorealistic pencil drawings, Karl Haendel uses drawing to discover connections and affinities between seemingly disparate nodes of cultural data, drawing attention to the overlaps between the social, political, and personal. In his recent portraits of Barbara Streisand and the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Haendel pays homage to two iconic cultural figures underscoring the wealth of meaning their images convey. In her work, Kim Dingle has infiltrated all manners of scenes and depictions of the American West with the figures of misbehaving little girls who wreak havoc on myths and truths held dear in the mainstream. For the exhibition, she created a new painting featuring the portraits of 350 psychiatrists and mental health professionals who deemed Trump unfit to serve in office and warned the public about it before the 2016 election. Painted on a nursery wallpaper sprinkled with images of innocent lambs and hearts, Dingle employs deft humor and painterly skill to effectively communicate her message.

The jokester/trickster harlequin motif underlying Sara Berman’s paintings is obscured as the artist works additional layers of paint onto the surface—scraping and wiping—and in the process suggesting the distortions from which we, the audience, view the female body. Honoring the roles that specific women have played in his life along with the unfairly outsized role that Black women play in bending the arc of history towards justice, Lavaughan Jenkins paints expressionistic images of women as icons of resilience and beauty with thick layers of paint applied with his fingers or a palette knife. As an Ethiopian-American, Helina Metaferia’s collage Headdress 59 features a portrait of Black Lives Matter co-founder Ayo Tometi, whom the artist photographed in Los Angeles. Her head adorned by a crown composed of archival images from Black Panther Newspapers, the figure draws upon traditional African sensibilities, where visual art and ritual fuse to create layers of meaning. Robert Pruitt’s monumental portraits weave past, present and future into intergalactic visions for a Black joyous future through transcendent imagery and mythological references. In his new work Standing Woman with Quantum Headdress, a woman with thickly braided hair wearing an intricately filigreed headdress seems like a royal ambassador visiting us from a future, more evolved society.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s work probes portrait photography through ambiguous images of sitters and his studio, creating a visual puzzle of surface, screen, and reflection. In Model Study (0X5A9487) a triple portrait occurs as the camera, out of view, captures the mirror reflection of the artist and his friend. Riffing on an European idea and history of the bohemian artist studio, Sepuya creates a new space for himself and his friends–a space of friendship and pleasure where the gaze abounds in many directions and where approval by an audience is neither requested nor required. For over forty years, John Sonsini has created nuanced and richly painted portraits of men, mostly day laborers he has befriended over many years. Painted directly from life, his paintings are a poetic and contemplative homage to each of his subjects, acknowledging and dignifying the hardship they have experienced. In the exhibition he presents a portrait of his partner, capturing his physical and psychological presence through masterfully and seemingly effortlessly applied strokes of thick oil paint. Salomon Huerta pays homage in a different way: in a series of still life paintings of fruit and guns he is remembering his father who always kept his gun nearby to keep his family safe in his east LA neighborhood. In his work, Pope.L sets language, performance, image making, and duration into a slippery relationship where language is seen as image and image as language, and where meaning often emerges only once the viewer reads the text featured in his paintings aloud. Presented here is a large scale painting referencing his well-known Skin Set works in which the absurdities of human classifications are exposed in powerful and poetic ways.

Another theme present in the exhibition is the use of portraiture as a way to convey meaning, ranging from the personal to the spiritual. Here, for example, Ever Baldwin balances both the exploration of inner and outer worlds through a mystical evocation of abstracted bodily configurations contained within elaborate handmade charred wooden frames. Sadie Benning’s work M consists of a 16-panel grid that arranges found photographs into a sequence suggestive of a narrative. Benning fractures the portrait of an unknown character and, through the application of a highly glossy resin surface suggesting the surface of a digital screen, foregrounds an additional layer of distance and ambiguity. Known for her distinctive paintings featuring a narrow lexicon of mysterious characters, from pointy-nosed or screaming women, to lightbulbs, peacocks and horses, Ellen Berkenblit invokes a sense of a narrative into which the viewer is only permitted intermittent glimpses. The suggestion of a larger context for her figures teeters on the edge of abstraction and figuration, signaling a dreamlike, yet powerful moodiness that hovers over the strange and ritualistic interactions between her characters.

Monique Van Genderen, who is known for her abstract paintings, presents a large canvas of dripping reds dedicated to the Austrian performance artist Herman Nitsch who is equally known for his boundary breaking bloody performances as he is for his machismo attitude as an artist. Riffing on the theme of dripping red paint, Monique has created a series of smaller abstractions that are attached to and lean against her large canvas in an attempt to both digest this historical lineage and to make it her own. Esther Pearl Watson presents two portraits of “guardian angels” executed in silver foil, characters that her father invented to navigate the challenges of every- day life and that help her sift through the traumas of her own childhood. Nate Lewis’s figures seem to float through a beautiful and vast universe and have a similarly angelic composure as they gracefully float through time and space. The three works presented by Amy Sillman outline her interest in the human figure that is at the very heart of her practice. The tender portraits of her friends, in which elbows, knees and other human features abound, have slowly merged over time into beautifully complex abstractions that have never strayed away from the awkwardness and the hilariousness of the human form and the discomfiture of its physical presence.