“Objects of Desire: Reflections on the African Still Life” is a tour de force of technical versatility, showcasing Meleko Mokgosi‘s multifarious painting skills alongside written testaments of his art’s heady conceptual foundations. Mokgosi’s paintings and sculptures span so many different genres, subjects, time periods, and styles that one having just entered Honor Fraser could be excused for initially mistaking this solo exhibition for a group show. There are figures; prehistoric cave paintings; still lifes; barely-recognizable cropped realistic portrayals, apparently of wood, that function as mysterious abstractions; and 3D sculpture-paintings fashioned of fondant on Styrofoam. Close examination reveals that all of these paintings bear Mokgosi’s singularly contemplative, delicate touch. More significantly, many of them depict African subjects in a manner of painting stemming from classical European traditions. The Botswana-born, New York-based artist devotes his work to questioning ethnocentricity and exposing the problematic nature of many historical accounts assumed to be authoritative. This installation completes his 4-year, 8-segment body of work titled “Democratic Intuition.” Printed pages among his paintings, inscribed with Mokgosi’s handwritten annotations, serve as a treatise critiquing ways in which African art has been historically misunderstood and treated as a pawn of Eurocentric ends. In notes interspersing texts relating to MoMA’s notorious 1984 “Primitivism” show, Mokgosi disputes the museum’s curatorial perspective that subordinated non-Western objects below the Modernist works that they ostensibly had inspired. Challenging that paradigm, Mokgosi engagingly employs European painting conventions in the service of uplifting African subjects from historically marginalized positions.

Honor Fraser Gallery
2622 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA   90034
Show runs through Dec. 19