Abiose Spriggs

Taken collectively, the painting of Abiose Spriggs–densely wrought at an intimate scale–form a notational outline of the diffuse and cyclical trajectories of the artist’s most immediate musings. With the familiarity of repeated phrases, Spriggs follows recurring threads of thought that give new shapes to ideas of blackness, and the question of what it means to be Black. One day’s answer is never so unshakable that it satisfies scale and the scope of questions that follow the next day. The frequency of repeated imagery provides markers for where those threads of thought linger and search for purchase–most overt in a series of Untitled monochromatic paintings that revisit Kerry James Marshall’s figure in his 1980 painting, The Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self. Each painting voices emphatic allegiance to its own tube-fresh palette. The near-flat surface holds the buildup of painterly shapes while efficiently-gouged contours outline figures and landscapes that once recorded, document a single entry in Spriggs’ chronicle of lived experience. 

Rebecca Wing, Making Strange Co-Curator