Practicing law in San Francisco in the year 2000, Javier Perés began collecting African Art. 16 years later, the Cuban-born collector, dealer, and gallerist operates Peres Projects, a pristine gallery facing the wide avenue of Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin's Friedrichshain district. His passion for collecting African works, like ritual helmet-masks worn by Sande women, stemmed from an attraction to the formal beauty of African traditions from regions surrounding the Ivory Coast, and has evolved into a collection of more experimental sculptures from regions of Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.#WildStyle #BrianCalvin #IgboArtist #Nigeria #PeresProjects #ContemporaryArt #AfricanArt #Berlin
A photo posted by Javier Perés (@peresprojects) on Jun 16, 2016 at 7:51am PDT
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The artists are as varied as the 80-year-old, American-born, Berlin-based Dorothy Iannone and the Texas-based collagist Mark Flood. Intrusively-placed pedestals populate the floor space, on top of which stand the abstracted, geometric wooden sculptures from Africa. In this way, viewers are forced to draw connections, or at least simultaneously examine, the varied means of representing the human form developed by African artists and contemporary Western painters.Iannone, whose straightforward, text-heavy erotic paintings allude to the spirituality of ecstatic love, is represented twice in the show. Once, with Metaphor (2009), a bright, animated-yet-sparse illustration of a Femdom couple, and again with Signs of Love (1985), a denser, more saturated piece filled with abstracted pictorial symbols. Next to Metaphor is a wooden headdress from Igbo, Nigeria of a seated figure holding another head on top of its own. Many of the African works have lost touch with their original meanings, a result of floundered oral histories and provenance muddled by colonization.#WildStyle #DorothyIannone #IgboFemale #PeresProjects #ContemporaryArt #AfricanArt #Berlin #June10
A photo posted by Javier Perés (@peresprojects) on Jun 9, 2016 at 1:47pm PDT
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Inspired by early 20th century exhibitions like those at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery, Perés is interested in exploring the contemporary possibilities of furthering dialogue between premodern sculptures and today’s evolving painting traditions. It wasn’t until the early 20th century that Western viewers even began to consider African art as art—until then, sculptures like the ones at Peres Projects were considered ethnological objects. MoMA’s contentiously titled Exhibition of African Negro Art in 1935 was influential to this recontextualization. The exhibition responded to and fueled the budding dialogue between African art and Modernism, particularly for artists including Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and Amedeo Modigliani.#MarkFlood #collage from the 1980's in #WildStyle #PeresProjects
A photo posted by bignickberlin (@bignickberlin) on Jun 11, 2016 at 2:37am PDT
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Perés' use of new context, set against the blank slate of freshly-painted white walls, builds new bridges between the two traditions. It’s not the first time the gallerist has staged such ideas. In Summer 2014, Peres Projects presented Group Spirit, an exhibition of Bundu masks from the secret, all-female Sande society of modern-day Liberia and Sierra Leone. The masks were featured alongside the works of contemporary painters like Assume Vivid Astro Focus and Harmony Korine. This exhibition posited a connection between the spiritual and ritualistic statuses of the masks with the paintings’ affiliation within the abstract movement, imbuing hidden meanings into commonplace materials. Wild Style’s turn to the formal feels significantly more like an open-ended shift.Wild Style: Exhibition of Figurative Art is on view at Peres Projects in Berlin until August 8, 2016. Find more information, here.Related:Hyperrealistic Paintings of Chrome Masks Celebrate African Art and BeautyBrazilian Muralist Gives Us A Rundown of Williamsburg’s Newest Art Hub8 African Artists to Know at the Armory ShowA photo posted by Javier Perés (@peresprojects) on Jun 8, 2016 at 10:30pm PDT