Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Portraits / PositionsKMAC Museum, Louisville, US
Past gallery exhibitions exhibition
Overview
Paul Mpagi Sepuya is known for his extensive photographic documents of domesticated scenes of friends, fellow artists, and lovers. Interwoven within these tender, often amatory, environments is Sepuya’s practice of including anatomized photographs of his studio. Serving as intimate studio still lifes his images capturing the dormant settings of portrait props, drapes, tripods and his own restaged photographs collaged onto mirrors, are further extensions of the pleasure and desire that stem from the social world in which his work is grounded.
Sepuya’s dissected scenes of portrait making presage a more cumulative process, one that continually builds on an identity firmly within a social structure of gay male peers and mentors. His tableaus are informed by a coded language of visuals, social cues, and other signals to queer culture from Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar and George Dureau to more obscure and subversive communities within the history of the gay avant-garde. Positioned within this historical framework, Sepuya aligns with the contemporary impulse among artists to locate a space of unity for their work to exist. As his photographs index previous studio activity and former portrait sessions, his studio becomes as much the focus as his living subjects.
Installation Views
Installation view, Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Portraits / Positions, KMAC Museum, Louisville, US, 2017
