NEW YORK, NY.- David Peter Francis presents A flower in the ending, a solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Donyel Ivy-Royal— his first in New York. Working in equal parts across painting, photography, sound, and installation, Ivy-Royal’s practice collapses past and present timelines into devoted tributes, born from a lineage of images, places, and loved ones.
Having developed a language of mark-making through early days in graffiti, impermanence found function as a foundation, extending beyond the personal or cognitive. What one may deem worthy of eradication—in the instance of street art, a power washing or a painting over—provides ample room for reification. A wall becomes source/texture, sequences of digital and analog photographs become basis for shape, and sound recordings serve as fodder for visual translation.
As with us all, the artist’s personal memory lives non-discriminately with historical past. There’s a portrait of his mother and father sourced from a photograph (around the time they were robbing 7/11’s together). The actual oval-framed print, long since dispossessed, is circulating from owner to owner through Portland’s punk scene. Elsewhere, the face of the police officer who arrested him while protesting resides next to the quiet still life of his partner’s sculptural practice in their shared home-studio. An after-image-like stain of Jean Genet’s 1958 play Les Nègres sits beside a depiction of eternally-lit candles. All, indeed, held in equal measure.
Yet, regardless of sentimentality, Ivy-Royal doesn’t dwell on image forever. He dredges into many of these works, scraping oil away as if trying to discover a former painting that’s long resided underneath. The material process of build up and removal finds an emotional landscape of sorts: an explosion. A recurring motif of the artist’s, it gives form to a moment while essentializing his palette and imagistic tenets of representation.
Love is an extreme thing, more than memory can concretely grasp ahold of. Whether from absence or unrecognizable change, the canvas exists as a substitute for the no longer. For Ivy-Royal, melancholy and optimism are two sides of the same coin.
Flip.
Donyel Ivy-Royal (b. 1993, Portland, OR) lives and works in Brooklyn. He has presented a solo exhibition at Hide & Seek, Portland, and has been included in group exhibitions at The School, Kinderhook; White Columns, New York; Sitting Room Gallery, New York; and Memorial Gallery, Brooklyn. In 2025, Ivy-Royal curated Garvey Flag: an art show, at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, New York. This is his first solo exhibition in New York City.
