Raymond Saunders. Post No Bills

About

Titled Post No Bills, this expansive presentation will span four decades of the artist’s work, including paintings and works on paper, many of which have never before been seen. This exhibition offers visitors insight into Saunders’s singular and influential practice, and coincides with the recent announcement that the artist will now be co-represented by David Zwirner and Andrew Kreps.

In his works, Saunders brings together his extensive formal training with his own observations and lived experience. His assemblage-style paintings frequently begin with a monochromatic black ground elaborated with white chalk—both a pointed reversal of the traditional figure-ground relationship and a nod to Saunders’s decades spent as a teacher. He subsequently adds a range of other markings, materials, and talismans. Expressionistic swaths of paint, minimalist motifs, line drawings, and passages of vibrant color tangle with found objects, signs, and doors collected from his urban environment, creating unexpected visual rhymes and resonances that reward careful and sustained looking. At once deliberately constructed and improvisatory, didactic and deeply felt, these richly built surfaces conjure the fullness of life, and its complications, allowing for a vast and nuanced multiplicity of meanings.