Gallery MOMO Johannesburg. Kenrick McFarlane. ANIMA

Gallery MOMO is pleased to present Kenrick McFarlane's first solo exhibition in South Africa, ANIMA. In this body of new work McFarlane presents us with paintings dominated by landscapes neither here nor there, dislocated stages for histories desires, violence and pleasures. ANIMA exists as a tableaux vivant of the artist own personification of Western history within his body, mind and spirit. 

McFarlane summons this archetype to guide the spirit of his making, taking form through the visual techniques of Renaissance painting layered with synthetic, and often off-kilter, colored cartooning. His work presents a keen awareness of the historical paucity that surrounds the representation of the black body within the practice of painting. McFarlane uses formal devices excavated from European painting to allude to the unseen black influence within the history of painting. 

McFarlane had his debut solo show entitled Face Off at the Gene Siskel Film Center followed by the exhibitions The King of Crooks at Morton College and The Tipping Point of Me and We at Little Black Pearl Art and Design Center. In the same year, McFarlane was selected by Kerry James Marshall to participate in an exhibition curated by Dawoud Bey titled Eclectic Coherence held at Expo Chicago, Navy Pier. McFarlane is a graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently pursuing his MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles.