Tschabalala Self
Out of Body

Thierry-Goldberg Gallery is pleased to present Out of Body, Tschabalala Self’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show opens on May 28th with a reception on June 4th from 6 to 8 and will run through June 18th. Out of Body includes eight new paintings and two sculptures, featuring Self’s study of the figure through an innovative process of painting, printing, and sewing.

My current body of work, Self explains, seeks to place the iconographic significance of the Black female body in contemporary culture. My work allows the exploration of my relationship to my body and bodies, which resemble mine.

In Pink Eye, 2015 — a 44” x 32” canvas on the back wall of the gallery— two brown eyes are stitched over a pink backdrop of six smaller eyes. One can instantly recognize the eye imagery, while other body parts start to uncover themselves in time. The vertically positioned brown eyes in the foreground double as female buttocks while a full female figure slowly reveals itself, bent over in an exposed position.

Similarly, in Sapphire, 2015, the largest painting in the exhibition, an exaggerated female figure is constructed of a variety of fabrics and sewn onto a blue background. Self’s sensibility for color and material is exemplified through the carefully assembled detail and the figure’s towering scale. A red calf, blue lace torso and flower patch as a nipple, are just some of Self’s distinctive gestures that make for an outstanding solo debut.

Tschabalala Self (b. 1990, New York) currently lives and works in New York and New Haven. She holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art, and a BA in Studio Arts from Bard College. Self has previously had solo exhibitions at Schur-Narula Gallery, Berlin, Germany and at the UBS Exhibition Center, Red Hook, NY. She has also exhibited at the Queens Museum of Art, NY; Essie Green Galleries, Harlem, NY; The Harlem School of the Arts, NY; Launchpad, Brooklyn, NY; and at 24/6 Gallery, New Haven, CT.