Under the title Some Bright Morning, the Fridericianum is presenting the first extensive solo exhibition by Melvin Edwards at a European institution. Featuring over 50 works, the show offers the opportunity to get to know the diverse abstract language of form of this sculptor, installation artist, and draftsman.
With a forward-looking approach to the questions, practices, and forms of modernism, Melvin Edwards established a body of work in the early 1960s that captivates with its great individuality and rigor. His oeuvre includes wall-mounted reliefs—the Lynch Fragments—barbed wire installations, freestanding sculptures, and works on paper. Although the works of Edwards, born in Houston, Texas, in 1937, are sited in the realm of abstraction, they allude to tangible points of reference. They evoke thoughts, feelings, and images that are linked to that historical context of the United States of America, from which the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s emerged. Edwards’s works can therefore be read as an expression of a political engagement—a protest against racial injustice that has not lost its urgency in the present day and one that, for the artist, can be transposed onto other parts of the world, including different regions of Africa and Central and South America.
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The Exhibition in Kassel and Its Context
The show at the Fridericianum, featuring over 50 of his works, marks Edwards’s first comprehensive institutional solo exhibition in Europe. It is being conceived in cooperation with Kunsthalle Bern and Palais de Tokyo, Paris, with each of the two venues presenting different tributes to Edwards’s work in 2025 and 2026. The museum presentations in Germany, Switzerland, and France follow on from a series of exhibitions showcasing the artist in the recent past. For instance, Edwards has been presented to a wider public at Dia:Beacon in New York (2022), the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln (Massachusetts) (2022), with the support of the Public Art Fund in New York (2021), at Museu Afro Brasil in São Paulo (2020), Museu Nacional da República in Brasilia (2020), Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia in Salvador (2019), Museu da República in Rio de Janeiro (2019), Museu de Arte de São Paulo (2018), the Columbus Museum of Art (2016), Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick (New Jersey) (2015), and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas (2015). Irrespective of these presentations, the exhibition in the documenta city of Kassel also evokes Edwards’s participation in the 56th Venice Biennale entitled All the World’s Futures (2015) and the group presentation Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 at Haus der Kunst in Munich (2016), which were curated by Okwui Enwezor.
The exhibition is being generously supported by the Stiftung Stark für Gegenwartskunst, the Hessian Cultural Foundation, and the Rudolf Augstein Stiftung.
Melvin Edwards: Some Bright Morning
Aug 31, 2024 – Jan 12, 2025
Fridericianum
Kassel, Germany
