CHICAGO, IL.- Sean Kelly is delighted to participate at EXPO Chicago in the Embodiment section of the fair curated by Dr. Louise Bernard, Founding Director of the Museum of the Obama Presidential Center, our booth #308 is located across from the fair’s Obama Presidential Center platform. We will present a focused selection of works that explore how contemporary artists give form to the human condition beyond traditional figuration. Through abstraction, material experimentation, and symbolic language, the featured artists consider the body as a site of memory, labor, identity, and collective experience.

Anchoring the presentation are works by artists that will be featured in the Obama Presidential Center, Lindsay Adams, Idris Khan, and a third artist to be announced soon. Lindsay Adams’s abstract paintings investigate gesture, interiority, and corporeal energy. Built from multiple layers of paint, her canvases foreground the physical act of mark-making and the accumulation of meaning across the painted surface. Adams’s forthcoming exhibition, SOIL, will open at Sean Kelly, New York, on April 17, 2026. Idris Khan’s layered compositions reference time, repetition, and collective memory in painting and sculpture. Drawing on musical scores and philosophical texts, his works translate these sources into densely layered surfaces. A new painting and sculpture by Idris Khan will be exhibited.

In addition, we will showcase artists whose practices expand representation through conceptual, cultural, and material strategies. We will feature a photograph from Dawoud Bey’s celebrated series The Birmingham Project, which reflects on the September 15, 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL. Created in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the tragedy, Bey’s series pairs portraits of Birmingham residents, who were the same age as the victims at the time of the attack, with individuals representing the ages the children would have been in 2013 if they have survived, transforming portraiture into a meditation on historical memory and absence. Jose Dávila’s photographic cut-out works further explore presence and absence. By removing key elements of an image until only its essential architecture remains, Dávila invites viewers to reflect on the significance of both what is visible and what has been removed. His forthcoming exhibition, The Simple Act of Positioning, will open at Sean Kelly, New York on April 17, 2026. In Awol Erizku’s multidisciplinary practice he develops an Afrocentric visual language that bridges African and Black American cultures while drawing on mythology, diasporic traditions, and contemporary imagery. His timeless portrait of Amanda Gorman, the youngest Inaugural poet in U.S. history reflects the resurgence of a Black renaissance. Works from Hugo McCloud’s plastic painting series continue his exploration of migration, global commerce, and the ecological systems that bind these narratives together. Known for transforming single-use plastic bags into richly layered compositions, McCloud traces the movement of people and goods through scenes of flora, markets, and everyday labor. Shahzia Sikander’s mosaic extends the language of her practice by translating the vibrant pixelation of her animated films into glass. Through this shift in medium, from ink and film to mosaic, Sikander expands the traditional scale of miniature painting, creating luminous compositions that evoke layered histories of migration, mythology, and identity. Kehinde Wiley is perhaps best known for his official presidential portrait of Barack Obama, displayed in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Wiley is renowned for his portraits that place contemporary Black and Brown subjects within the visual language of European Old Master painting, challenging historical hierarchies of representation while celebrating identity and visibility.

Together, these works present a nuanced exploration of embodiment that moves beyond literal representation to consider how memory, history, and material processes shape human experience. Anchored by artists with strong ties to Chicago and its cultural institutions, Sean Kelly’s presentation offers a resonant contribution to Dr. Louise Bernard’s inaugural Embodiment section at EXPO Chicago.