NEW YORK, NY.- Marianne Boesky Gallery announced representation of artist Sanford Biggers, whose practice encompasses installation, film, video, drawing, sculpture, original music, and performance. Biggers’ work deals with well-recognized social, political, and cultural narratives, which he reinterprets to highlight new and underlying perspectives. The gallery will feature Biggers’ work as part of its presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach in December, to be followed by a solo exhibition in New York in 2017.
Leveraging the formal qualities of the vast range of media with which he works, Biggers creates installations and “vignettes” that inspire dialogue on issues such as formalism, the shifting meaning of symbols, nostalgia, history, the figure, and the complexities of identity in today's social and political landscape. Biggers’ work is as visually compelling as it is conceptually complex, taking viewers on a journey from initial aesthetic encounter through the many embedded layers of meaning to create what he terms, “a future ethnography.”
Among his diverse works is BAM (2015), which is comprised of a series of wooden African sculptures that the artist collected, dipped in wax, and reshaped through gunshots as a response to recent and ongoing occurrences of police brutality against African-Americans. The work also comments on ideas of obliteration, physical and metaphoric, while complicating the Classical figure in sculpture. In another work, Lotus (2007), the artist etched lotus petals into a seven-foot tall disc that upon closer examination reveal images of the lower decks of slave ships—the bodies crammed and arranged to highest efficiency. The imagery is a visceral collision of references to peace and unthinkable human cruelty. Other works draw from quilts, collages, and sculptures that explore American history and symbolism.
Biggers currently has a solo exhibition on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, titled Subjective Cosmology, which features the final chapter of the three-part film, Shuffle Shake Shatter. Developed over seven years, the film follows the journey of an un-named protagonist, struggling with his identity through crises and enlightenment. The show also features other objects and installations from the artist’s oeuvre. Biggers has previously had solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Sculpture Center, and MASS MoCA, and participated in group shows at the Tate Britain and Modern, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and institutions in China, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Russia. His work is also in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Walker Art Center, and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
In addition to his solo practice, Biggers is part of Moon Medicin, a collective that creates and performs original music as well as reimagined covers. The conceptual band’s music is presented against a backdrop of curated sound effects and images that reference global rituals, world politics, sci-fi, and sacred and coded symbols—all of which relate to the musical compositions and offer audiences a multisensory and immersive experience. Biggers serves as the creative director, and is joined by a rotating roster of musicians, designers, and performance artists.
“Sanford’s work is powerful in its formal acuity and its ability to convey an intricacy and depth of meaning. Approaching his subjects with a distinct awareness of history and contemporary socio-political currents, he creates art that is intellectually, psychologically, and emotionally compelling. It moves us to connect, and engage with personal and societal truths,” said Marianne Boesky. “At the same time, his play with material and fluid movement between media positions him within a wide spectrum of art historical movements, making his practice, in many ways, boundless. It’s a pleasure to bring Sanford into our program, and I look forward to working with him on upcoming exhibitions of his tremendous work.”
Biggers is originally from Los Angeles, but has been based in New York since 1999. He is Associate Professor and Director of Sculpture at Columbia University's Visual Arts program, and a board member of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Sculpture Center, and the Neue House. He holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Morehouse College in Atlanta.
