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.
The exhibition 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.
