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拍品专文
Titus Kaphar’s 2015 painting, An Icon for Destiny, is an excellent example of his disruptive and conceptual practice. This present work puts on full display many of the artist’s signature visual tools—quotations of the traditional art historical canon, physical intervention obscuring and remixing this imagery, and a use of unconventional media with multi-layered meanings.
In An Icon for Destiny, Kaphar depicts a single female figure, her lower half draped in sumptuously gold-colored fabric, seated atop a lush velvet pillow, against a geometrically patterned wall. She faces forward, hands crossed in her lap, and in many ways, this painting evokes a combination of art historical referents—nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings in the backdrop, and one of Michelangelo’s female Sibyls of the Sistine Chapel, in her head wrap and garb. However, the most striking feature of Kaphar’s depiction of this sitter is that her body is entirely featureless, her torso and face rendered in thick swirls of tar, making her a dark silhouette. Directly going against the usual function of a portrait, she avoids personal recognition, her identity obscured. What might seem like an erasure of the sitter, though, is instead a call for viewers to shift their gaze to the unseen, underrepresented figures on which history and its painters chose not to accentuate.
This focus on subverting representation, particularly of Black sitters, is central to Kaphar’s artistic practice: “If we don’t amend history by making new images and new representations, we are always going to be excluding ourselves or folks that look like us. This is a significant thread in my practice: illuminating the characters who were inevitably there, but no one cared to document their existence” (T. Kaphar, in conversation with C. Rankine, Language of the Forgotten, 2018, p. 49). Beyond merely calling attention to the existence of this character, with the present work, Kaphar glorifies her. The title An Icon for Destiny, references both traditional religious iconography and the popularity of the name “Destiny” in African American culture—a popularity he later elaborated on in his 2016 portrait series “Destiny,” which depicted composite forms of mugshots of women with that name, making clear the racism inherent to the criminal justice system. The present work combines these two allusions to not only humanize, but deify the Black female figure.
In his various series, Kaphar has used several techniques towards this goal of interrogating representation—slashing and shredding canvas, overlaying figures with whitewash, and, like in the present work, swapping oil paint for dark, textured tar. While the darkness of the tar does obscure the figure presumably beneath it, its swirled impasto quality adds depth to what might initially seem to be a flat negative space. In this way, Kaphar suggests the personal depth of the historically overlooked, underrepresented Black figures depicted in art history that have been flattened and simplified.
In addition to its direct connections to centuries-old Western art history, Kaphar’s work also exists in a dialogue with contemporary artists. Like Theaster Gates and Rashid Johnson, he uses tar in artistic explorations of Blackness. By playing with visibility with silhouette-like and often featureless human figures to interrogate the concept of artistic representation of Black sitters, Kaphar evokes the work of Kerry James Marshall and Kara Walker. With An Icon for Destiny, Titus Kaphar unites historical and contemporary artistic conventions to raise questions and draw attention to both urgent and enduring issues of portraiture and the representation of marginalized and erased sitters.
In An Icon for Destiny, Kaphar depicts a single female figure, her lower half draped in sumptuously gold-colored fabric, seated atop a lush velvet pillow, against a geometrically patterned wall. She faces forward, hands crossed in her lap, and in many ways, this painting evokes a combination of art historical referents—nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings in the backdrop, and one of Michelangelo’s female Sibyls of the Sistine Chapel, in her head wrap and garb. However, the most striking feature of Kaphar’s depiction of this sitter is that her body is entirely featureless, her torso and face rendered in thick swirls of tar, making her a dark silhouette. Directly going against the usual function of a portrait, she avoids personal recognition, her identity obscured. What might seem like an erasure of the sitter, though, is instead a call for viewers to shift their gaze to the unseen, underrepresented figures on which history and its painters chose not to accentuate.
This focus on subverting representation, particularly of Black sitters, is central to Kaphar’s artistic practice: “If we don’t amend history by making new images and new representations, we are always going to be excluding ourselves or folks that look like us. This is a significant thread in my practice: illuminating the characters who were inevitably there, but no one cared to document their existence” (T. Kaphar, in conversation with C. Rankine, Language of the Forgotten, 2018, p. 49). Beyond merely calling attention to the existence of this character, with the present work, Kaphar glorifies her. The title An Icon for Destiny, references both traditional religious iconography and the popularity of the name “Destiny” in African American culture—a popularity he later elaborated on in his 2016 portrait series “Destiny,” which depicted composite forms of mugshots of women with that name, making clear the racism inherent to the criminal justice system. The present work combines these two allusions to not only humanize, but deify the Black female figure.
In his various series, Kaphar has used several techniques towards this goal of interrogating representation—slashing and shredding canvas, overlaying figures with whitewash, and, like in the present work, swapping oil paint for dark, textured tar. While the darkness of the tar does obscure the figure presumably beneath it, its swirled impasto quality adds depth to what might initially seem to be a flat negative space. In this way, Kaphar suggests the personal depth of the historically overlooked, underrepresented Black figures depicted in art history that have been flattened and simplified.
In addition to its direct connections to centuries-old Western art history, Kaphar’s work also exists in a dialogue with contemporary artists. Like Theaster Gates and Rashid Johnson, he uses tar in artistic explorations of Blackness. By playing with visibility with silhouette-like and often featureless human figures to interrogate the concept of artistic representation of Black sitters, Kaphar evokes the work of Kerry James Marshall and Kara Walker. With An Icon for Destiny, Titus Kaphar unites historical and contemporary artistic conventions to raise questions and draw attention to both urgent and enduring issues of portraiture and the representation of marginalized and erased sitters.