52 Walker, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner
New York, 52 Walker, Gordon Matta-Clark & Pope.L: Impossible Failures, February 3–April 1, 2023
Katherine C.M. Adams, "Gordon Matta-Clark and Pope.L's "Impossible Failures,"" e-flux, February 17, 2023, online (52 Walker, New York, 2023 installation view illustrated)
"Gordon Matta-Clark & Pope.L: Impossible Failures at David Zwirner Gallery/52 Walker Street, NYC (Video + Photo Story)," ArteFuse, March 1, 2023, online (52 Walker, New York, 2023 installation view illustrated)
Riccardo Conti, "Impossible Failures, the exhibition that brings Gordon Matta & Pope.L into dialogue," Harper's Bazaar, March 14, 2023, online (52 Walker, New York, 2023 installation view illustrated)
Lee Ann Norman, "Gordon Matta-Clark & Pope.L: Impossible Failures," The Brooklyn Rail, March 15, 2023, online (52 Walker, New York, 2023 installation view illustrated)
Jesse Doris, "Gordon Matta-Clark & Pope.L: Impossible Failures at 52 Walker finds consonances between two very different artists," The Architect's Newspaper, April 6, 2023, online (52 Walker, New York, 2023 installation view illustrated)
American • 1955
Pope.L, who calls himself “The Friendliest Black Artist in America©”, is a visual artist and educator whose multidisciplinary practice uses binaries, contraries and preconceived notions embedded within contemporary culture. “At 62, POPE.L is inarguably the greatest performance artist of our time,” Megan O’Grady wrote in The New York Times Style Magazine in March 2018, “This is exactly the kind of label he would find absurd, but over the course of the last four decades, no artist has so consistently broken down the accepted boundaries of the genre in order to bring it closer to the public, with lacerating, perspicacious and gloriously anti-authoritarian projects that play with our received notions of race and class and almost always cut more than one way.”
Building upon his provocative performances and public interventions, Pope.L has applied the same social and formal strategies to painting, photography, performance, video, and installation to probe issues of language, system, class, race and gender. For his RePhotocollage series, Pope.L has manipulated and combined images of body parts to create “figural encounters”. Originating out of the artist’s desire to betray the artist’s hand while simultaneously creating images highly suggestive of the body, these compositions are scanned, flattened and reprinted on single large planes of paper.
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