ANTHONY AKINBOLA
Sweet Tooth
March 25 – April 29, 2023
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OPENING RECEPTION, SATURDAY, MARCH 25, 5–8 PM
NIGHT GALLERY NORTH
2050 IMPERIAL STREET
Night Gallery is proud to announce Sweet Tooth, an exhibition of new work by Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola. This is the artist’s second solo show with the gallery, following 2021’s Market.
The Nigerian-American artist Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola is known for his ongoing CAMOUFLAGE series, which utilizes the durag as primary material. Through the artist’s intervention, the durag transcends immediate recognition to become a formal and conceptual vehicle for rigorous abstractions. Breaking from traditional approaches to painting and sculpture, the works revel in stylistic range and present an evolving dialogue between line, texture, and color.
Sweet Tooth introduces multidimensional works into the CAMOUFLAGE oeuvre, complemented by expanded palettes reminiscent of the stripes on candy wrappers or a circus tent. Freestanding claw machines—some of which contain extravagant prizes to be won while others function as vitrines for figurative sculptures—are held within vibrant wall works that evoke a festival or Carnival celebration. As the show’s title suggests, Akinbola is interested here in the slippery balance between indulgence and discipline, aptly offering viewers a haptic experience of art rather than a solely visual one.
Intended to be played by audiences, the machines prompt a consideration of the tensions between intrinsic and prescribed value; the authenticity or quality of a prize is less significant than the psychological rush of potentially winning one and feeling closer with each attempt. The prize is a formality in order to get you to play the game. Elsewhere, Akinbola reappropriates claw machines as display cases for a series of clown sculptures. Jesters and clowns—who historically perform unexpectedly keen cultural commentary via satire and exaggeration—are cleverly symbolic for Akinbola’s larger exploration of unchecked self-allowance. In their lampooning naiveté, the clowns seem to know the game to be rigged, and wait patiently for our brains to catch up.
In his new suite of CAMOUFLAGE paintings, Akinbola has expanded the visual language of his linework to echo the broader themes of duality: harmony and dissonance, repetition and deviation, reliance and independence. Working in diversified color arrangements and new formal orientations, the works take on a festive quality as Akinbola joins the lineage of abstract painters using the stripe motif to forge experimental color relationships, such as Sean Scully or Ian Davenport.
Prominent in several cultures around the world, Carnival is characterized by maximalism; sheer opulence and pleasure just before the pious restriction of Lent. In Sweet Tooth, Akinbola at once tempts and tempers our desires with a palpable spirit of playfulness and experimentation. Ask any Mardi Gras celebrant or cotton candy aficionado: total deprivation is no fun, too much fun is no fun at all.
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Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola (b. 1981, Missouri) has had solo exhibitions at Sean Kelly, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna; Carbon 12, Dubai; John Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan; and the Queens Museum, New York. His work has been featured in group shows at Hauser & Wirth, New York and Los Angeles; Pace Gallery, New York; and the Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, among others. Akinbola's work is included in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Zabludowicz Collection, London. Akinbola lives and works in New York.
Above: "Lavender Taffy," 2023
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MARCEL ALCALÁ
The Performance of Being
March 25 – April 29, 2023
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OPENING RECEPTION, SATURDAY, MARCH 25, 5–8 PM
NIGHT GALLERY NORTH
2050 IMPERIAL STREET
Night Gallery is pleased to announce The Performance of Being, an exhibition of new oil paintings by multidisciplinary artist Marcel Alcalá. This is their second show with the gallery, following their 2021 solo presentation Solita.
Alcalá’s canvases feature a vibrant mélange of references to Los Angeles landmarks, art history, and the artist’s own Mexican-American heritage and queer community. Their “main characters” range from a drag queen to a dominatrix, a lone coyote roving a twilit landscape to a skull situated in an Orange County mall. Colorful brushstrokes evoke psychedelic or spiritual landscapes. The artist unites the aesthetics of Santería, Catholicism, and drag in an attempt at transcendence, viewing painting as a performance that can take both maker and audience beyond the limits of the body, religion, the past, and “reality”... whatever that may be.
In Duality of Story (2023), Alcalá paints a screenwriter friend who stands between two doorways: one leading to the California wilderness and the other to Jumbo’s Clown Room, a legendary Hollywood strip club. At the figure’s feet lay Save the Cat (a canonical screenwriting book) and a Bank of America bill. The artist describes their friend as both masculine and feminine, bound perhaps by the three-act structure and credit card payments, yet still able to define themselves and choose their own adventure.
Alcalá, a former clown performer themselves, unites comedy with darkness throughout the canvases. Their “girlies,” or figures with simple smiley faces, appear across the show. Through painting, Alcalá transforms the Catholicism of their childhood, and its attendant shame, into a site of self-invention and camp: Presence of Mind (2023) features a golden Boyle Heights gazebo topped with a crucifix (a structure common to Mexican pueblos), set against a bubblegum pink sky. A figure wearing an intricately adorned cape, who’s based on a queer wrestler the artist knows, stands on the stairs, hands at their hips as they strike a pose. The religious and architectural symbology simply serve as a stage.
Two paintings suggest the cyclical nature of the show. My Abuelas Cactus (2023) culls memories from the artist’s childhood. Their grandmother’s cactus appears against the thin, colorful paper decorations made and hung during Día de los Muertos and the “ferias” that celebrate certain pueblos. A fetus floats in front of these signifiers, blue and red die indicating the sense of chance that will shape its life. The Performance of Being (2023) takes compositional inspiration from El Greco’s 1586 Burial of Count Orgaz, conveying a sense of drama at majestic scale. The painting features the artist playing dead, or at least entranced in a state of otherness, surrounded by their mother and closest friends, who offer their care. Amid all of Alcalá’s bright masks and theatricality, this sense of compassion and community is especially meaningful, and quite real.
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Marcel Alcalá (b. 1990, Santa Ana, CA) has had solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Mickey Gallery, Chicago; and Deli Gallery, Brooklyn. Their work has been featured in group shows at Lyles & King, New York; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles; Ballroom Marfa, TX; Simon Lee Gallery, New York; and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, among others. Alcalá has exhibited in numerous museums and institutions, including Tom of Finland Foundation, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and MCA Chicago, IL. Their work has been written about in LA Weekly, Hyperallergic, and Flaunt, among others. They have been an artist-in-residence at Skowhegan (2022) and Tom of Finland Foundation, Los Angeles (2020). Alcalá lives and works in Los Angeles.
Above: "Presence of Mind," 2023
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NIGHTGALLERY.CA
2276 East 16th Street
2050 Imperial Street
Los Angeles, CA 90021
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