Awol Erizku: Quaquaversal

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Ben Brown Fine Arts is delighted to present 多維空間 Quaquaversal, an exhibition of new works by Los Angeles- based conceptual artist Awol Erizku. This bold showcase, featuring paintings, neon installations, and a newly unveiled series of bronze sculptures, builds on the artist’s ongoing engagement with the city of Hong Kong, first initiated in his 2018 exhibition 慢慢燃燒 Slow Burn. 多維空間 Quaquaversal continues Erizku’s exploration of materiality, symbolism, and cultural intervention, expanding dialogues around cultural authorship and art history while electrifying African diasporic identity in a powerful act of revival.

Erizku reimagines the visual and linguistic landscapes of music, popular culture, and sports symbolism, deconstructing and reconstructing cultural motifs to create nuanced narratives that favor Afrocentric perspectives. In 多維空間 Quaquaversal, Erizku fuses disparate elements, producing a cultural flip that re-examines the established canons of art history, philosophy, and language. At the heart of his practice is a dissection of the persistent hegemony of Eurocentric ideals, unmasking their quiet colonisation of global cultural narratives and intellectual frameworks. This critique examines how these ideals subtly yet powerfully continue to dictate standards of beauty, knowledge, and civilisation, often at the expense of diverse and marginalized worldviews, particularly in art. Erizku’s work defies these dominant frameworks, offering instead an Afrocentric vision he terms Afro-Esotericism.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Awol Erizku (b. Ethiopia, 1988), Erizku received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Cooper Union, New York, NY and a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT.

Erizku’s work has been exhibited at prominent institutions including the Museum of Modern Art New York, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville, AR; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA; FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; and The Momentary, AR. His photographs of cultural and creative leaders have been featured in The New Yorker, New York Magazine, GQ, and Vanity Fair, and in 2021 the Public Art Fund exhibited his work throughout New York, NY and Chicago, IL. Erizku's works are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, FL; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; By Art Matters (Hangzhou Contemporary Art Museum), Hangzhou; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. Erizku lives and works between Los Angeles, CA, and New York, NY.