Sam Dirck

Sam Dirck’s small painting Untitled (all works cited, 2020) evokes a glam pop portrait, a visage of Ziggy Stardust sheen dappled with crude globs of red, yellow, and blue paint. A warped checker pattern defines the area where the forehead and eyes might be, and glorious thin pink lips sit below. The painting is one of several works in Dirck’s “Boredom Fantasy Mimesis” that repeat and transform core motifs. In Gardener, Dirck employs a similar checker pattern, but here the black shapes are mostly uniform squares that cover the entire canvas. They hover over a narrative landscape featuring what

picks November 06, 2019

Sanlé Sory

Prop telephones, large sunglasses, and motorcycles appear throughout Sanlé Sory’s portraits of West African young adults, taken in the 1960s through ’80s in what is now Burkina Faso, just after the country gained independence from France. These retro objects, along with the painted backdrops and sharp, youthful fashions, index the culture of a specific place and time.

Portrait au Tapis, 1971, for example, depicts a young man in an unbuttoned shirt with a wide collar. A pendant rests on his chest hair, and his cocked hip accentuates the hefty belt on his striped pants. Jeune fan d’Eddy Mitchell,