Amy Sherald: the heart of the matter...

About

Amy Sherald documents contemporary black experience through arresting, otherworldly paintings. Drawing upon the American Realist tradition, she subverts the medium of portraiture to tease out unexpected narratives and situate black heritage centrally in the story of American art. With ‘the heart of the matter…,’ her inaugural exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, Sherald debuts a suite of new paintings that reinforces the multiplicities of African-American life and invites viewers to reconsider commonly accepted notions of race and representation.

Informed by the artist’s reading of key texts that explore tensions between interior and public realms, ‘the heart of the matter…’ draws its title from the first chapter of bell hooks’ seminal book ‘Salvation,’ and builds on themes of silence and stillness explored in Kevin Quashie’s ‘Sovereignty of Quiet’ and U.S. Poet Laureate Elizabeth Alexander’s ‘Black Interior.’ In her new paintings, Sherald considers how these relate to the conceptualization of blackness as it is represented publicly, questioning representation of black identity, which often negates the complex reality of an interior life. She envisions black American identity beyond the conceits to which it has largely been restricted, attempting to restore a broader, fuller picture of humanity.