Remy Jungerman
BRILLIANT CORNERS
APRIL 10 – May 15, 2021
Fridman Gallery is honored to announce the first major solo exhibition in the United States of Remy Jungerman, whose works explore the intersection of pattern and symbol in Surinamese-Maroon culture, the larger African Diaspora, Jazz, and 20th Century Modernism.
BRILLIANT CORNERS includes the artist’s new body of work, featuring wall-based panels and sculptural assemblages of textiles and clay. Jungerman covers bold geometric-patterned fabric with white kaolin clay, and carves grid lines into the clay, at once obscuring and revealing the underlying patterns of the textile. The resulting surfaces are delicate, tactile, and layered, recalling the low-toned rhythms of the Agida (a long narrow drum used in the Winti religious ceremonies of the Surinamese Maroons), and the switched key releases, silences, hesitations, and harsh percussive touch of Thelonious Monk. By placing textile, clay, beads, and nails in direct contact with patterns and forms drawn from European Modernism, Jungerman presents a vision that does reparative justice to oversimplified perspectives on art history.
Alongside the exhibition, in the downstairs media room, the gallery will present a film, Visiting Deities (1962), by the Dutch anthropologist Bonno Thoden van Velzen. The film features the Ndjuka, a Maroon tribe from the area where Jungerman was born. He is a descendant, on his mother’s side, of the Maroons who escaped enslavement on Dutch plantations to establish self-governed communities in the Surinamese rainforest.
24.4 x 15.4 x 2.8 in.
Suriname-born Dutch artist Remy Jungerman (1959) lives and works in Amsterdam. He attended the Academy for Higher Arts and Cultural Studies in Paramaribo, Suriname, before moving to Amsterdam where he studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy.
In his work, Jungerman explores the intersection of pattern and symbol in Surinamese Maroon culture, the larger African Diaspora, and 20th Century “Modernism.” In bringing seemingly disparate visual languages into conversation, Jungerman’s work challenges the established art historical canon. As art and culture critic Greg Tate has remarked “Jungerman’s work leaps boldly and adroitly into the epistemological gap between culturally confident Maroon self-knowledge and the Dutch learning curve around all things Jungerman, Afropean and Eurocentric.”
Born and raised in Suriname, he is a descendant, on his mother side, of the Surinamese Maroons who escaped enslavement on Dutch plantations to establish self-governed communities in the Surinamese rain forest. Within their rich culture, many West-African influences are preserved including the prominent use of abstract geometrical patterns. Placing fragments of Maroon textiles, as well other materials found in the African diaspora such as the kaolin clay used in many African religious traditions or the nails featured in West African Nkisi Nkondi power sculpture, in direct contact with materials and imagery drawn from more “established” art traditions, Jungerman presents a peripheral vision that can enrich and inform our perspective on art history.