Various Small Fires is proud to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Lezley Saar, the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery and first in its Texas space. In Saudade, Saar offers a series of surreal portraits of women from countries previously colonized by Portugal, including Angola, Cape Verde, and Brazil. Saar highlights each woman’s legacy and reflects on the journeys they all traversed.
Saar spent a significant amount of time in Lisbon over the course of three years, where she grappled with the captivating beauty of the city while remaining keenly aware of its troubling colonial past. Portugal was the first European country to engage in the transatlantic slave trade, capturing Africans on the Atlantic coast in the mid 15th century. Many of the enslaved were sent to Brazil, which would go on to be the last country to end slavery in 1888. Reflecting on her own mixed African and European heritage, and inspired by the rich artistic holdings of Portugal, Saar’s new series presents key women of the Afro-Portuguese diaspora.
Saar depicts well-known women from history like Xica da Silva, a parda woman from Brazil whose legendary tale includes being born into slavery and eventually gaining her freedom to become rich and powerful. Saar also portrays lesser known figures like Maria Farmina dos Reis, who is considered Brazil’s first Black female novelist and whose abolitionist novel Ursula offered an early depiction of life under slavery. Symbols of nature and biology adorn each figure, transforming the otherwise colonial-style portraits into nature-infused representations of each woman’s personality. Each woman’s mystifying likeness is encased in a found Baroque or Gothic frame, highlighting the contrast of their features with the aesthetics of their colonizers.
Saudade is a melancholic nostalgia and yearning for an absent place or people, and a state of mind intrinsically linked to the Brazilian and Portuguese disposition. Saar seeks to reflect this sense of saudade in her portraits, given that each of the women endured forced or voluntary migration in her lifetime. We are invited to imagine their lives in the New World, far removed from their ancestral homes.
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Lezley Saar (b. 1953 Los Angeles, lives and and works in Los Angeles) was born to artist parents Richard and Betye Saar. Saar’s works include paintings, drawings, book-works, photography, banners, collages, dioramas, and installations. Her various series, “The Atheneum,” “Anomalies,” “Mulatto Nation,” “Tooth Hut,” “Autist’s Fables,” “Madwoman in the Attic,” “Monad,” “Gender Renaissance,” “A Conjuring of Conjurors,” and “Black Garden,” deal with notions of identity, race, gender, beauty, mysticism, sanity, and normalcy. She has held solo exhbitions at Various Small Fires, Seoul, South Korea; Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Los Angeles; Kravets/Wehby Gallery, New York; and David Beitzel Gallery, New York. Recent group exhibitions include The Wende Museum, Culver City; Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas; Koplin Del Rio, Los Angeles; and Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles. Saar is in the public collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, North Carolina; The Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; The Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California.
