NEW YORK, NY.- Yancey Richardson will present highlifetime, an exhibition of new work by David Alekhuogie, the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together work from his series A Reprise—including layered, wall-mounted works that combine photographs, collage and sculpture—Alekhuogie continues his exploration of how narrative and authorship are embedded in Western presentations of African art while reflecting on how Black aesthetics are circulated, accessed, valued and interpreted today. Coinciding with the exhibition will be the release of Alekhuogie’s new monograph titled A Reprise, published by Aperture.

Alekhuogie’s series A Reprise is the result of his engagement with the photographs Walker Evans made while on commission from the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1935 of African sculptures included in the exhibition African Negro Art. These photographs were revisited in Perfect Documents: Walker Evans and African Art, 1935, an exhibition organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2000, that reexamined the tightly cropped and formally inventive images Evans made. Alekhuogie’s encounter with this exhibition and the images Evans made sixty-five years prior provided the basis for considering how Black aesthetics and cultural objects have been altered—if not altogether changed—by their exhibition in western institutions and subsequent documentation by photographers such as Evans. In highlifetime, Alekhuogie investigates these images of African sculpture by remixing them into vibrant and multilayered collages which attempt to reanimate historical objects after their original capture.

Accompanying new works from the A Reprise series are selections from Alekhuogie’s 2017 series Pull_Up, which will be on view in the project gallery. Referencing the fashion trope of sagging pants that reveal successive layers of clothing, Alekhuogie creates flattened and nearly abstract fields of layered color and contrasting textures. With the horizon line of the waist present yet concealed, Alekhuogie reimagines the body as a landscape, one where the coded representations of Black masculinity can be explored.

David Alekhuogie (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA) is a photographer and artist based in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from Yale University in 2015 and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. His work will be featured in the Hammer Museum’s upcoming Made in LA 2025 biennial. His work was included in Companion Pieces, the 2020 iteration of the Museum of Modern Art, New York’s biennial New Photography series and was presented in Men of Change: Power. Triumph. Truth (2021) at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. His work has also been exhibited at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angles, CA.