Blitz Bazawule

About

(BEVERLY HILLS — July 30, 2021) — UTA Artist Space is pleased to present A Moment In Time, a deeply personal solo exhibition by the Grammy-nominated, visionary artist Blitz Bazawule (b. 1982, Accra, Ghana). The exhibition is the first major visual project since the artist co-directed Beyonce’s Black Is King in 2020, and follows the news of Bazawule’s role as director of Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple musical.

“The power of Blitz is his ability to shift the culture through art,” said Arthur Lewis, UTA Fine Arts and UTA Artist Space Creative Director. “Sometimes this shift is like a sonic boom, and other times, as with these brilliant new paintings, the change is a more subtle gesture that makes an indelible mark on the psyche.”

As an artist, Blitz’s multidisciplinary practice combines his experience as a director, producer, musician, author, and visual artist. His distinctive style pushes collage and mixed media into a new world, creating a bold, fresh visual language that is simultaneously original and iconic.

On view for the first time will be a series of eight new paintings accompanied by an immersive multimedia video installation inspired by the concept of time as a cyclical continuum. A Moment In Time posits that moments from our personal histories can be reanimated as new memories for the present.

The genesis of the series was inspired by the artist’s’ memories of the faded black-and-white photos that lined the walls of his childhood home in Ghana— images of his family elegantly dressed in their Sunday best that stirred a deep sense of nostalgia, which then grew to strong desire to bring those moments back to life. Later, while on tour in Morocco, the artist stumbled upon a vintage photograph of a woman standing in the very same place as he was at that moment, but 50 years before.