McArthur Binion
Ghost: Rhythms
April 6–June 23, 2013
Kavi Gupta, Chicago
835 W. Washington Blvd
Chicago, IL 60607
Kavi Gupta CHICAGO | BERLIN presents its first exhibition with McArthur Binion titled Ghost: Rhythms focused on the artist’s early career in the 1970s in New York City. Like many of his peers at the time, Binion was influenced by the Abstract Expressionists and developed a deep interest in visual communication and Modernism. The work from this exhibition was originally curated into a show at the renowned Artists Space New York during its inaugural year by Carl Andre, Sol Lewitt, and Ronald Bladen.
While Binion was interested in the formal qualities of medium, shape, and color like his contemporaries, he also found a powerful voice in the language of modernism to share personal and African-American narratives. McArthur Binion was the first African American to graduate from Cranbrook University with an MFA, after which he would move to New York City and eventually to Chicago, where he has lived and worked for the last thirty years. His experience as a child picking cotton in rural Mississippi was also an influence on Binion’s practice of labor-intenstive mark making, grinding wax crayon into canvas, panel, and aluminum creating hard-earned layers over time. A large part of this exhibition focuses on his large tarp-like works on unstretched canvas that simulate aerial views of rural landscapes, abstracted and made of repetitive and diligent mark making.
McArthur Binion (b. 1946) lives and works in Chicago. Recent exhibitions include Perspectives 177: McArthur Binion, at Contemporary Art Musem Houston; Color Exploration: Simplicity in the Art of McArthur Binion, University of Maryland University College of Arts Program Gallery; House: Work, Center Galleries, College for Creative Studies Detroit; Simplicism II: The Goaches, Audible Gallery, Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago. McArthur Binion is in numerous private and public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Cranbrook Museum of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; and the Detroit Institute of Art.
For more information please visit www.kavigupta.com.