HONG KONG.- Ben Brown Fine Arts is presenting 多維空間 Quaquaversal, an exhibition of new works by Los Angeles-based conceptual artist Awol Erizku. This bold showcase, featuring paintings, neon installations, and a newly unveiled series of bronze sculptures, builds on the artist’s ongoing engagement with the city of Hong Kong, first initiated in his 2018 exhibition 慢慢燃燒 Slow Burn. 多維空間 Quaquaversal continues Erizku’s exploration of materiality, symbolism, and cultural intervention, expanding dialogues around cultural authorship and art history while electrifying African diasporic identity in a powerful act of revival.
Mystic Parallax is the first major monograph by rising interdisciplinary artist Awol Erizku.
Erizku reimagines the visual and linguistic landscapes of music, popular culture, and sports symbolism, deconstructing and reconstructing cultural motifs to create nuanced narratives that favor Afrocentric perspectives. In 多維空間 Quaquaversal, Erizku fuses disparate elements, producing a cultural flip that re-examines the established canons of art history, philosophy, and language. At the heart of his practice is a dissection of the persistent hegemony of Eurocentric ideals, unmasking their quiet colonisation of global cultural narratives and intellectual frameworks. This critique examines how these ideals subtly yet powerfully continue to dictate standards of beauty, knowledge, and civilisation, often at the expense of diverse and marginalized worldviews, particularly in art. Erizku’s work defies these dominant frameworks, offering instead an Afrocentric vision he terms Afro-Esotericism.
The exhibition features a series of five bronze sculptures, each housed in a bespoke ‘cultural safe.’ These hybrid sculptures depict the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti fused with various objects, including a spider, a skull, a scorpion, and Sphinx statuettes. This work represents the culmination of a 13-year journey that began when Erizku embarked on a search for Nefertiti’s bust in Cairo, ultimately leading him to Berlin, where the statue resides. Erizku’s intense study of the bust during his time in Berlin informs this sculptural series, distilling the emotional and intellectual intensity of his experience into a powerful artistic statement. Nefertiti is a recurring motif in Erizku’s oeuvre, where she becomes a symbol of Black omnipresence. His work reclaims her image from colonial narratives that have sought to diminish her significance. The encasement of these sculptures in cultural safes reflects ongoing debates about cultural sovereignty and the contested ownership of Nefertiti’s image. The gun, a motif echoed in Erizku’s paintings, symbolises the threat posed by cultural institutions in controlling and sanitising this powerful African icon, transforming her into a tool for ideological battles within art and heritage.
Erizku’s 多維空間 Quaquaversal paintings extend his ongoing examination of "Street Hieroglyphics" and corporate logos, tracing their presence in urban landscapes. These works oscillate between mechanical precision and human gesture, borrowing from the visual vernacular of advertising and street signage. While anchored in global capitalist systems, they maintain a cryptic, layered relationship with their subjects, inviting deeper engagement. By playing with the tension between machine-like accuracy and the hand’s imperfect touch, Erizku encourages viewers to reflect on the broader cultural resonance of these images, probing how they shape and reflect contemporary life.
Firearm manufacturer logos, commonly found in gun shops across Europe and the Americas, are vibrantly obscured with commercial and industrial-grade spray paint and acetone. These pieces explore the charged political and social undercurrents embedded in these symbols. By appropriating logos from companies like Winchester Repeating Arms and Savage Arms, Erizku juxtaposes corporate branding with aesthetics of resistance. The contrast between bright, playful colors and the dark histories of violence, racism, and civil unrest pushes viewers to critically reassess the role such imagery plays in both American pop culture and the global cultural landscape.
Erizku further expands his exploration of neon as a medium, presenting a vivid series of light works that pulse with cultural resonance and visual intensity, drawing on the legacy of neon signage and its historical significance, from the streets of Hong Kong to the broader socio-political landscape. Among these is the provocative The New World is Yours (2024), which depicts a hand flipping a coin – a gesture heavy with connotations of chance and choice. This work deftly intertwines notions of agency and fate, inviting viewers to consider the complexities of luck and decision-making in a contemporary context. The neon’s vibrant glow serves not merely as a light source but as a beacon of potential and aspiration, prompting an interrogation of the social and economic narratives shaping the Black experience today.
Erizku’s use of neon, a medium often associated with commercialism, transforms it into a powerful tool for dialogue, urging reflection on the significance of our choices in a world where they are simultaneously abundant and constrained. The exhibition also features a sculpted dice box in the red, black, and green colors of the Pan-African flag. The dice motif, recurrent in Erizku’s work, deepens the conversation with the neon pieces, harkening back to notions of global identity and the role of chance in its formation.
Through 多維空間 Quaquaversal, Erizku not only challenges the canons of art history and cultural ownership but also reframes discussions around identity, heritage, and power in a globalized world. His oeuvre celebrates African diasporic identity while enacting a potent act of reclamation, presenting a resolute and unflinching vision that demands a critical reassessment of the narratives underpinning our perceptions of African consciousness, no matter where we find ourselves.
Awol Erizku (b. Ethiopia, 1988), Erizku received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Cooper Union, New York, NY and a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT. Erizku’s work has been exhibited at prominent institutions including the Museum of Modern Art New York, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville, AR; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA; FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; The Momentary, AR and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah. His photographs of cultural and creative leaders have been featured in The New Yorker, New York Magazine, GQ, and Vanity Fair, and in 2021 the Public Art Fund exhibited his work throughout New York, NY and Chicago, IL. Erizku's works are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, FL; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; By Art Matters (Hangzhou Contemporary Art Museum), Hangzhou; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA, among others. Erizku lives and works between Los Angeles, CA, and New York, NY.
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