Somaya Critchlow: Paintings

Description

Somaya Critchlow's canvases and sketchbooks log an ongoing process of world building. The artist fashions these realms by drawing upon her expansive knowledge of picture-making traditions ranging from the Renaissance to the Rococo. In charting the ever-expanding dimensions of this female dominated universe, Critchlow casually disarms the distinctions that inform concepts of high and low culture by uncovering the ways in which class and racial difference are routinely conflated. The voluptuous, self-possessed women who explore Critchlow's fantasy landscapes and pensively occupy domestic interiors or otherwise blank pages owe as much to the aesthetics of Love and Hip Hop as they do to Peter Paul Rubens, and thus prompt the viewer to consider the disparate ways in which we esteem these forms of culture-and the women they feature. Paintings includes a newly commissioned scholarly text by Amanda Renshaw.

Somaya Critchlow (b. 1993, London) lives and works in London. She obtained her BA in Painting at the University of Brighton before joining The Royal Drawing School in London, where she earned a Postgraduate Diploma in 2017. Maximillian William recently debuted her first solo exhibition in London, Underneath a Bebop Moon (2020). Her prior solo shows include Sincere for Synonym at Fortnight Institute, New York (2019). Group shows featuring her work include (Nothing But) Flowers at Karma, New York (2020); and Role Play at Maximillian William, London (2019). Critchlow's work is featured in collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art; RISD Museum, Providence; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; ICA Miami and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art, Norwich.

A collection of her sumptuous figures that revel in the joys of beauty, sensuality, and desire.--Miss Rosen "Dazed"