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Lot Essay
Winner of the Golden Lion award for best participant at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, Arthur Jafa is an artist, filmmaker, and cinematographer who confronts the complex issue of personal identity. Exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in London and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, LeRage is his most celebrated sculpture, a self-portrait that builds on the artist’s childhood interest in science fiction, comic book heroes and fanzines, and the characters who inhabit them. Other examples from this edition belong to the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, the Museum of Contemporary, Chicago, and the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami.
Standing nearly seven feet tall, LeRage presents an “Incredible Hulk”-type figure bursting up from earth. His muscular frame almost overwhelms the anger displayed on his face, which is incandescent with rage. The foreshortening of the clenched right fist and extended left fist indicates the tremendous velocity at which the figure appears to be approaching, bursting through the two-dimensional picture plane and into the three-dimensional world.
In a similar vein to Andy Warhol, who harnessed pop culture to reflect us back to ourselves, LeRage reflects the influence of popular culture on Jafa. He grew up watching popular TV series such as The Green Hornet and I Spy and this opened up his imagination to an expanding idea of possibilities involving fantasy. It was only later in adulthood that he began to make a connection between the two, and his complex identification with aliens and yetis. The figure in LeRage is the result of that realization.
For over thirty years, with a reverence for forebears such as David Hammons and Kerry James Marshall, Arthur Jafa has tackled the relationship between visual culture and blackness. Often drawing content from an archive of images amassed over a lifetime, Jafa embraces a complex approach to authorship and legitimacy. The visual experiences he creates seek to, in his words, “replicate the power, beauty, and alienation of black music” (A. Jafa, quoted in “Arthur Jafa,” ICA Miami, online [accessed: 4/15/2025]).
Standing nearly seven feet tall, LeRage presents an “Incredible Hulk”-type figure bursting up from earth. His muscular frame almost overwhelms the anger displayed on his face, which is incandescent with rage. The foreshortening of the clenched right fist and extended left fist indicates the tremendous velocity at which the figure appears to be approaching, bursting through the two-dimensional picture plane and into the three-dimensional world.
In a similar vein to Andy Warhol, who harnessed pop culture to reflect us back to ourselves, LeRage reflects the influence of popular culture on Jafa. He grew up watching popular TV series such as The Green Hornet and I Spy and this opened up his imagination to an expanding idea of possibilities involving fantasy. It was only later in adulthood that he began to make a connection between the two, and his complex identification with aliens and yetis. The figure in LeRage is the result of that realization.
For over thirty years, with a reverence for forebears such as David Hammons and Kerry James Marshall, Arthur Jafa has tackled the relationship between visual culture and blackness. Often drawing content from an archive of images amassed over a lifetime, Jafa embraces a complex approach to authorship and legitimacy. The visual experiences he creates seek to, in his words, “replicate the power, beauty, and alienation of black music” (A. Jafa, quoted in “Arthur Jafa,” ICA Miami, online [accessed: 4/15/2025]).