Looking at the viewer fixedly in a squatting pose, the flamboyant woman in Tschabalala Self’s Princess, 2017, is a token of the artist’s imaginative mind. Designed from imagination, and endowed with grandiose features including a blue face, an orange neck, cheetah-patterned collarbones and mulberry stilettos, the protagonist exudes a strange but compelling force, dominating the wide expanse of the canvas with unparalleled charisma. She is at once divine and levelled, distant and familiar, embodying the claim that Self’s ‘figures are not exactly portraits and not precisely characters. Self calls them avatars for her own personality’ (Laura Cumming, ‘Lubaina Himid: Invisible Strategies; Tschabalala Self review – history and mystery’, The Guardian, 22 January 2017, online). Experiencing a spectacular ascension in recent years, Self’s body of paintings has been the subject of numerous solo shows including the recent Bodega Run at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Tschabalala Self at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, coinciding in 2019. Notably, Princess was included in the group exhibition Mademoiselle which took place at the Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain Occitanie in 2018-19, bringing together a generation of artists reflecting on the diversity of women's experiences in the modern world.
Born in Harlem in 1990, Self primarily focuses on the subject of the black woman in her figurative output, addressing the way black bodies defy the narrow spaces in which they are often forced to exist. Her figures are realised in a mixture of painting, discarded canvas scraps and fabrics that, when affixed to a stretched canvas, create ripples and undulations that mimic movement. ‘My mom would sew at home [...] I started sewing after my mom passed’, the artist elucidated. ‘She would trace patterns on the floor, and I frequently work on the floor as well. I use a lot of the fabric that she collected. She would also reuse things. If my sisters outgrew a pair of pants, she would turn them into skirts. I do that in my practice. Everything is a part of the space that it was created in’ (Tschabalala Self, quoted in ‘An Individual Is Made of Many Parts: Tschabalala Self Interviewed by Sasha Bonét’, BOMB Magazine, 20 November 2018, online).
Formally weaving different materials, memories and stylistic inspirations within her compositions, Self has cited Romare Bearden’s 'huge influence' in her work, notably with regards to ‘collage, his interest in black quotidian life’ (Tschabalala Self, quoted in ‘An Individual Is Made of Many Parts: Tschabalala Self Interviewed by Sasha Bonét’, BOMB Magazine, 20 November 2018, online). Yet in the conflation of materials and genres, Self’s work simultaneously calls to mind the eclectic oeuvre of the artist and writer Faith Ringgold. Growing up surrounded by the Harlem Renaissance, Ringgold conjured complex portraits and scenes of what she knew in diverse materials and dimensions, spanning oil paint, quilt and sculpture. Similarly, Self’s Princess undergoes a prodigious amalgamation of materiality, producing an instantly absorbing image that colours the viewer’s surroundings with values of its own.
With her real human hair, her blue breasts and her supernatural-looking eyes, the Princess within the present work – literally displaying stitched Disney princesses on her chest – summons visions of surreal feminine glory. Her hypersexualised body is assertive rather than enshrouded in false humility; it exemplifies Sasha Bonét’s claim that Self’s characters ‘are not dainty or faint beings. They are heavy and deliberate and delicate at once’ (Sasha Bonét, ‘Tschabalala Self maps the intricacy of the black aesthetic’, Document Journal, 30 May 2019, online). Presenting the viewer with a seminal female figure – unnamed and universal, yet titularly regal – Self subsequently endows her with a distinct contemporary edge. In this perspective, Princess dithers between genres, taking from figuration, abstraction, self-portraiture, and pure fantasy.
