Sam Durant, Open Your Eyes (2022), via Praz-Delavallade
This fall, artist Sam Durant opens a show of new works at Praz-Delavallade in Paris, continuing a body of work that mines the artist’s long explored modes of practice, while turning his examinations of modern culture, history and context on its ear. Long recognized for work that questions, highlights, and reframs social and civic issues from the more complex sides of history: colonialism, the death penalty, surveillance and slavery among them, the artist here turns towards the playful and exploratory, marking new notes in an already expansive and expressive practice.
Sam Durant, Certainty (2020), via Praz-Delavallade
Here, Durant takes on archival source material and turns the works into a body of new prints, assembling various images collected from research in protests and revolutions. Taking bodies culled from the expanse of history, and then transposing them into ghostly after images, the artist takes on these historical modes and places them on a shared plane. Durant mined this source material and in lieu of drawing protest events, he disassembled and cut, and then reordered, fragments of these mostly black-and-white images of toppled monuments. Images of toppled statues and their twisting, classical forms here emphasize an extended engagement with history, one that simultaneously draws on the art historical, classic modes of object making, and on its continual presence in the modern discourse. Durant understands the nature of style as a historical device in its own right, and the holdover aesthetics of bygone eras here serve to emphasize outdated structures of oppression, racism and state violence.
Sam Durant, Love Is Louder (2023), via Praz-Delavallade
Sam Durant, Certainty (2020), via Praz-Delavallade
Durant’s works here also take on protest imagery and transpose it, taking texts from protest banners and signs and moving it over to his signature lightbox works. Stripped of their context, the meanings of these texts become ambivalent and vague, as if almost operating on the opposite end of the works nearby. Opening up conceptual conversations into the nature of the image and its meaning, honed through this particular lens, the show is an intriguing one.
The show closes November 10th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Sam Durant at Praz-Delavallade [Exhibition Site]
