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Gagosian is happy to current Benefit In, an exhibition of recent work and a brand new set up by Honor Titus on the gallery in Beverly Hills. That is the artist’s first exhibition with Gagosian.
“The tonality of tennis is so very wealthy and pursuits me tremendously,” Titus says. “The implications of leisure and sophistication draw me in, whereas, as a participant, I do know it to be a completely maddening endeavor. A well-dressed wrestle for victory will be analogous to life itself.”
In an oeuvre marked by its immediacy and vary, Titus attracts on architectural, cinematic, musical, sporting, and literary sources (he has described approaching his topics as if by way of the eyes of an “surprising confidante” akin to The Nice Gatsby’s Nick Carraway). By this compound perspective, he reframes formal social traditions for an inquiring modern viewers, moreover underscoring the cultural significance of depicting folks of shade within the contexts of leisure and luxurious.
This holds demonstrably true within the tennis motif. Within the tellingly titled Prosperity (all works 2023), Titus depicts a Black ball boy standing in entrance of a deep-blue backdrop emblazoned with the art-deco Rolex crown emblem (in any other case referred to as the Rolex coronet), his raised arm suggesting a gesture of triumph. Second Serve particulars the highly effective musculature of a participant’s arm as she swings her racquet overhead. And in Between Video games, a participant is proven stress-free on a courtside bench, sipping a well-earned cuppa. Whereas these work appear to solid a watch again to easier instances of their celebration of country-club joie de vivre, they continue to be related to the current second, and echo Titus’s painterly intentions of bucking the viewer’s expectations.
Titus’s earlier work depict faceless figures inhabiting pared-down city environments, their anonymity hinting at an attendant sense of loneliness. These works additionally confront viewers with a intentionally romanticized view of America’s previous, though right here, depictions of a gleaming Nineteen Fifties automotive or a boy in baseball gear signify a much less outwardly conflicted, pre-digital age. In more moderen work, Titus continues to discover concepts of sophistication, belonging, and inheritance, however he focuses on the ritualized formality of elite occasions akin to debutante balls, and the themes have a tendency to look remoted inside their coded societal milieux.
Visually, Titus’s work have a daring immediacy that derives from their mixtures of repeated sample, wealthy coloration, and finely rendered element. Their juxtaposition of flat planes of shade with ornamental parts is impressed by the work of the nineteenth-century French Symbolist group Les Nabis, which counted Maurice Denis (1870–1943) and Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) amongst its members. Titus is influenced as nicely by Fairfield Porter, the Chicago Imagist group, and a raft of painters absorbed within the aesthetics of promoting and trendy city life, from Edward Hopper to Alex Katz. Echoes of Raymond Pettibon are discernible in Titus’s graphic stylizations of the human determine, as is the affect of Henry Taylor, who mentored Titus upon his 2016 arrival in Los Angeles and gave him his first solo exhibition in his studio there in 2020.
On the gallery in Beverly Hills, Titus’s work encompass an set up that reproduces the format of a tennis court docket, with synthetic turf and painted strains, encouraging viewers to think about themselves as gamers within the artist’s sport, however the internet is changed with an ornate iron barrier in step with the ornamental thrives that seem all through the artist’s work.
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