‘Engender’, Featuring 17 Contemporary Artists, at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles

Kohn Gallery presents “Engender” at their Los Angeles venue.

“Engender” is a group exhibition featuring seventeen contemporary artists who are revolutionizing the way one visualizes conventional gender as exclusively male or female. Through painting, a medium that has traditionally embraced this binary, these artists are pushing the genre in new, unprecedented directions, challenging the ways in which paintings can be used to deconstruct and rewrite conventional notions of personal identity. The exhibition highlights the inter-blending of traditional and figurative abstraction as the foundation for more fluid and inclusive expressions of identity, engendering a new visual pronoun. “Engender" is beyond the binary. From a variety of different cultures, ethnicities, and backgrounds, the presented artists internalize a number of societal projections, while asserting their own individual presence and significance. A number of artists in the exhibition—including Mequitta Ahuja, Zoë Charlton, Firelei Báez, Christina Quarles, Tschabalala Self—deconstruct black female subjectivity by reassembling disparate iconographic materials and motifs into fragmented portraits. Others such as Hernan Bas, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, and Jesse Mockrinexplore self-discovery through images of androgynous young boys rendered in shifting historical and contemporary styles.

Established in Los Angeles in 1985, Michael Kohn Gallery has exhibited the work of 20th-century artists from Picasso to Warhol.For nearly 25 years the Michael Kohn Gallery has maintained a space in Los Angeles.