Mickalene Thomas. Femme au divan II

For Mickalene Thomas’ exhibition Femme au divan II at the Pavillon Bosio at the École Supérieure d’Arts Plastiques in Monaco, the artist will present a collection of paintings, a series of photographs and a video. With her unbounded experimentation and vivid imagination, Thomas evolves splendid images of black women through an astounding array of artistic and material forms, as well as through the lens of myriad art historical, cultural, and social references. Her art is an aesthetic of complex intersectionality and seemingly incommensurable juxtapositions that is deeply influenced by the legacy of painting in the canon of Western art, ranging from nineteenth century European artists such as Ingres, Courbet and Manet, to twentieth century European and American artists, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and later David Hockney.

Thomas is deeply committed to reimagining black female subjectivity in art, which she envisages by imbuing her models with a sense of magical realism enabled through her precise formal manner and aimed at countering problematic historical representations of black women. Her paintings are embellished with sparkling strass and enamel paint that glimmer when touched by light. The women’s Afro hairstyles simultaneously structure and defy the frame in unexpected ways, while the use of transparent acrylic renders the forms abstract when applied flat. Thomas evolves a pictorial treatment that effortlessly melds dynamic and diverse compositional elements: the patterns on flowery, retro clothing, leather furniture, wicker and bamboo, resist-dyed African fabrics, painted wood panels, embroidered rugs, indoor plants, texturized Scandinavian lampshades, and crocheted cushions. Yet her control of rhythm, form, colour and motif succeeds in constructing a coalesced space - one in which we immediately realize the potential of being and form in new and unanticipated ways.

Born in Camden (New Jersey) in 1971, Mickalene Thomas lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Trained at Southern Cross University (Lismore, Australia, 1998), a Fine Arts graduate in painting at the Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, 2000) and with a Master’s degree in the Fine Arts at the Yale University School of Arts (New Haven, 2002), Mickalene Thomas is one of the best known artists on the contemporary scene in the United States. She has recently had a number of important solo exhibitions, notably at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (2012), the Santa Monica Museum of Art in California (2012), and the Brooklyn Museum in New York (2012), and she has produced specific projects for the On-Site, P.S.1/MoMA in New York (Le Déjeuner Sur l’Herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires, 2010) and Better Days (Volkshaus Art Basel, 2013 and very soon in Berlin in 2014).

Her work can be found in leading private and public collections, such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Guggenheim Museum New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, MOMA PS1, the Smithsonian American Art Musem, the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, Canada, the Rubell Family Collection, the Sender Collection, and the Taschen Collection.

Mickalene Thomas has been represented by the Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/ Brussels since 2013. The preview of her first solo exhibition in France at the Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Paris will take place on 11 September 2014.

The exhibition is organised by The Monaco Project for the Arts.