David Zwirner and Andrew Kreps Gallery are pleased to announce PostNoBills, an exhibition of work by American artist Raymond Saunders at David Zwirner’s 519 and 525 West 19th Street galleries in Chelsea and Andrew Kreps Gallery at 22 Cortlandt Alley in Tribeca. Curated by Ebony L. Haynes, this two-part presentation will highlight Saunders’s ability to infuse his work with social relevance and commentary while maintaining a sense of visual dynamism and spontaneity challenging viewers to confront the complexities of the human experience.
In his works, Saunders brings together his extensive formal training with his own observations and lived experience. His assemblage-style paintings frequently begin with a monochromatic black ground elaborated with white chalk—both a pointed reversal of the traditional figure-ground relationship and a nod to Saunders’s decades spent as a teacher. He subsequently adds a range of other markings, materials, and talismans. Expressionistic swaths of paint, minimalist motifs, line drawings, and passages of vibrant color tangle with found objects, signs, and doors collected from his urban environment, creating unexpected visual rhymes and resonances that reward careful and sustained looking. At once deliberately constructed and improvisatory, didactic and deeply felt, these richly built surfaces conjure a range of themes, allowing for a vast and nuanced multiplicity of meanings.
The exhibition takes its title from a 1968 painting by Saunders—which will be on view at David Zwirner—that features a small rectangular patch of expressionistic brushstrokes collaged onto a vast red monochromatic background. This refrain, which recurs in later works, including some of those in the exhibition, can be seen to encapsulate the artist’s incisive views on such wide ranging themes as community, public space, art making, and visibility. In appropriating signage deliberately designed to keep communal surfaces bare and make way for paid advertisements and re-presenting it in the context of a work of art destined to be hung in a white cube, Saunders questions the inbuilt structures that dictate inclusion and exclusion, both in the public sphere and the art institution.
On view will be a range of paintings that embody this inquiry, showcasing Saunders’s nuanced visual vocabulary that seamlessly traverses both high and low points of reference. Through this radical treatment of pictorial space, Saunders contemplates issues of power, control, and the limits of expression in contemporary society—whose voice can be heard and who can post where. Haynes states, “The opportunity to present the work of Raymond Saunders across two spaces has been extremely rewarding. Saunders's singular practice spans decades and yet so much of the work has never been documented or exhibited widely. Post No Bills highlights Saunders's intentional and effective formal style that blends painting, drawing and collage, and focuses on his consistent observations and questioning around belonging and visibility, and the quieted dissent of a formidable painter.”
Saunders’s singular aesthetic finds echoes in the work of artists ranging from Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg to Joseph Beuys and Jean-Michel Basquiat all roughly working in parallel—but remains unmistakably his own. As curator Connie H. Choi of The Studio Museum in Harlem describes, “Sights and sounds pass by as one moves along a city street, encountering the world, making decisions, and changing one’s mind as one goes. Such is the beauty of Saunders’s paintings. They are about life and all of its battles and victories, dirtiness and splendor.”
As Saunders writes in Black Isa Color (1967): “I am responsible for being as fully myself, as man and artist, as I possibly can be, while allowing myself to hope that in the effort, some light, some love, some beauty may be shed upon the world, and perhaps some inequities put right.”
