David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce Halfrican, an exhibition of new paintings by Chase Hall. The exhibition will be on view in Los Angeles, where it will occupy three of the gallery’s spaces at 5130 W. Edgewood Pl., from November 8 through December 14, 2024. An opening reception will be held on Friday, November 8 from 6 to 8 PM.
Hall has developed an expansive vocabulary for documenting the ever-shifting line between personal and generational narratives. His distinct approach to his materials, which include the staining of cotton supports with espresso and the alchemy of producing his own coffee-based pigments which have characterized his work of the last few years, reflects and critiques the ways in which systemic forces of oppression, and trade, have divided people, territory, and the physical substance of the planet itself.
As its title suggests, each painting in Halfrican poses a series of questions about how identities are constituted, often along lines that are not as clear as they might seem. This show includes works in a wide variety of scales, from a twenty-four-foot painting—the largest and most ambitious of the artist’s career—to more intimate portraits in the style of yearbook headshots. It finds him exploring stories of freedom and friendship, as well as archetypal cycles of human development. Group portraits of young men wearing overalls and other work gear, for instance, point to the virtues of collaboration as well as an interest in creating revisionist takes on the American mythos. In many of these paintings, Hall delicately traces the line between self-reliance and participation in supportive community. He identifies how systems throughout the human and natural worlds balance competing needs for self-determination and unity, and reflects on ways in which these themes contribute to the ever-unfolding history of the United States.
[ . . . ]
Chase Hall was the subject of a solo exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia in 2023. In 2022, Hall was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to produce a large-scale artwork, the monumental diptych Medea Act I & II, for its opera house in New York. Hall has been included in group exhibitions including Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2024); Day for Night: New American Realism, Palazzo Barberini, organized by the Aïshti Foundation, Rome (2024); Together in Time: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Black California Dreamin’, California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2023); NGV Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2023); Black American Portraits, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2021); Young, Gifted and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art, University of Illinois Chicago (2021); and This Is America | Art USA Today, Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, the Netherlands (2020). Hall has been an artist-in-residence at The Mountain School of Arts, Los Angeles; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), North Adams, Massachusetts; and Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture, Maine. Hall’s work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Hall lives and works in New York.
