Artist and Filmmaker Arthur Jafa Joins Sprüth Magers

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’ll proceed to be represented by the New York–based mostly Gladstone Gallery.

“We’re very joyful to be working with Arthur Jafa,” Monika Sprüth stated in an announcement ARTnews. “His multidisciplinary strategy to image-making, and his work’s robust conceptual roots, are very a lot in line with artists of the gallery, from John Baldessari, Jenny Holzer, and Rosemarie Trockel to youthful generations equivalent to Cao Fei, Anne Imhof, and Martine Syms.”

For the previous 30 years, the Mississippi-born artist has been remixing and reimagining sonic and visible artifacts that he has amassed. He gained worldwide acclaim with the 2016 movie Love Is the Message, the Message Is Loss of life, which consists of spliced-together clips from police physique cameras, broadcast segments, civil rights demonstrations, basketball video games, and concert events, all set to Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam”. The movie, like a lot of his oeuvre, presents a fancy portrait of Black pleasure and ache. In 2020, when the nation was violently, defiantly divided over the homicide of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, 13 museums screened the movie for 48 hours.

Jafa gained the 2019 Golden Lion on the Venice Biennale for The White Album (2018), a 30-minute collage of discovered and private footage that explores Black-white relations which, per his message, may even at their greatest be awkward—and at their worst, lethal. “Simply because the movie critiques a second fraught with violence, in tenderly portraying the artist’s family and friends, it additionally speaks to our capability for love,” the jury wrote.

For his upcoming exhibition with Sprüth Magers, titled “nativemanson”, the artist will current his latest movie, BG (2024), which reimagines pivotal scenes in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, in addition to different current works throughout disciplines. (BG beforehand went below a distinct title when it first appeared earlier this yr at Gladstone, the place it polarized critics.)

“Now we have been following AJ’s work for a few years and are regularly astounded at his means to poignantly distill so many visible, historic and theoretical components into his follow,” Philomene Magers stated in an announcement to ARTnews. “We stay up for supporting his future tasks internationally, starting with this vital exhibition within the metropolis the place he has lived and labored for thus a few years.”