Sharif Bey: Crowns Encoded

April 18 - June 1, 2024 New York
  • Sharif Bey: Crowns Encoded, April 18 – June 1, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and albertz benda, New York. Photo: Adam Reich (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Sharif Bey: Crowns Encoded, April 18 – June 1, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and albertz benda, New York. Photo: Adam Reich (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Sharif Bey: Crowns Encoded, April 18 – June 1, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and albertz benda, New York. Photo: Adam Reich (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Sharif Bey: Crowns Encoded, April 18 – June 1, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and albertz benda, New York. Photo: Adam Reich (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Sharif Bey: Crowns Encoded, April 18 – June 1, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and albertz benda, New York. Photo: Adam Reich (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Sharif Bey: Crowns Encoded, April 18 – June 1, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and albertz benda, New York. Photo: Adam Reich (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Sharif Bey: Crowns Encoded, April 18 – June 1, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and albertz benda, New York. Photo: Adam Reich (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Sharif Bey: Crowns Encoded, April 18 – June 1, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and albertz benda, New York. Photo: Adam Reich (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Sharif Bey: Crowns Encoded, April 18 – June 1, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and albertz benda, New York. Photo: Adam Reich (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Sharif Bey: Crowns Encoded, April 18 – June 1, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and albertz benda, New York. Photo: Adam Reich (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Sharif Bey: Crowns Encoded, April 18 – June 1, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and albertz benda, Los Angeles. Photo: Adam Reich (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Sharif Bey: Crowns Encoded, April 18 – June 1, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and albertz benda, New York. Photo: Adam Reich (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

    Sharif Bey: Crowns Encoded, April 18 – June 1, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and albertz benda, New York. Photo: Adam Reich

  • NEW YORK, NY: albertz benda is pleased to announce Sharif Bey’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, and his first...

    NEW YORK, NY: albertz benda is pleased to announce Sharif Bey’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, and his first in New York following a succession of surveys at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2021); Gardiner Museum, Toronto (2022); Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse (2022); and the Belger Arts Center, Kansas City (2023). This exhibition will bring together three of Bey’s most ambitious seriesto date, premiering two major bodies of work alongside the New York debut of his Guardians series.


    Bodily in scale, standing between three and six feet tall, Bey’s recent ceramic and mixed-media sculptures represent an evolution of his formal vocabulary.In 2022, Bey was awarded the prestigious USA Artists fellowship which, in tandem with a residency at the Archie Bray Foundation in Montana, led to a new emphasis on scale and a deepening of the artist’s ongoing investigation of power through ornamentation. Drawing upon traditions of public sculpture, Bey’s newest series demonstrates this approach. Comprised of monolithic heads reminiscent of Benin bronze ceremonial sculpture and the Moai of Easter Island, these works confront and exceed the body, exploring how authority and aura are communicated through physical presence.
  • Bey’s sculptural practice reclaims fragments of disparate visual histories and creates a new context for their interpretation, welcoming conjecture and...

    Bey’s sculptural practice reclaims fragments of disparate visual histories and creates a new context for their interpretation, welcoming conjecture and speculation. These works further his enduring interest in nkisi nkondi power figures from the Congo region, while also drawing upon iconography from his upbringing in Pittsburgh. Impaled by nails and ceramic shards, the large-scale busts of his Domestics series are adorned with headdresses made of oversized colorful glass spoons. Bey recalls seeing similar decorative objects, originally made of carved wood, hung in the homes of family and friends as a child. Re-imagined as a monolithic glass crown, the spoons take on a totemic significance magnified by the suggestive ritual function of the sculpture’s impaled surface.


    Themes of symbolic and physical weight reoccur throughout this presentation: in the heaviness of the nails, spoons, and chains that adorn the sculptures; the visual magnitude of monolithic objects; and the encumbrance of our cultural context. Chain-draped figures, such as Guardian Series: New Growth (2022), offer a point of departure for a re-assessment of our own associations. Do the chains suggest bondage, or are they forms of adornment? What do we carry as we move forward, as we try to grow and nurture? In posing these questions, the works in this exhibition invite the viewer to examine the weight of their own chains.
  • ABOUT SHARIF BEY Sharif Bey is a Syracuse-based artist and educator. Shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, Bey...

    ABOUT SHARIF BEY

     

    Sharif Bey is a Syracuse-based artist and educator. Shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, Bey studied sculpture at The Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia. Later, he earned his BFA from Slippery Rock University, his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and PhD (in art education) from Penn State University. Inspired by modernism, functional pottery, Oceanic Art and Art of the African diaspora, Bey’s works investigate the cultural and political significance of adornment and the symbolic and formal properties of archetypal motifs, while questioning how the meaning of icons and function transform across cultures and time.

     

    His awards include: The United States Artist Fellowship (2022), The Pollock-Krasner Fellowship (2018), and The New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2017). Bey’s works are featured in numerous public collections including: The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, The Carnegie Museum of Art, The Columbus Museum, The Dallas Museum of Art, The Mint Museum, and The Nelson Atkins Museum among others. Forthcoming exhibitions in 2024 include Sand, Ash, Heat: Glass at the New Orleans Museum of Art and a solo presentation at the John Kohler Arts Center, Wisconsin.