That’s Amore
Monsieur Zohore
December 1 – January 8, 2023
Opening Reception: December 1, 7–11 PM
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
KDR305 presents, That's Amore, a solo presentation of new paper towel works by Ivoirien-American artist Monsieur Zohore.
For more than ten years, Zohore's paintings, made from Bounty Paper Towels and bleach, elicit the idea of the bathetic body; toxic, wasteful, and disposable as a metaphor for the treatment of marginalized domestic workers. The comedy contained within these durable yet disposable materials quickly transfigures itself into a drama of social inequities. The material has an intended sense of labor, implying a laboring body—a typically marginalized laboring body—equally durable and disposable. His relentless images force viewers to contemplate their ideas of shame and their relationship to labor.
That's Amore reframes Monsieur Zohore's ongoing research on mourning, melancholy, and loss through the lens of romance. In these sculptural essays, Zohore utilizes the language of joinery to address love conceptually through a material found, made, fused, broken apart, and hopefully put back together again. Each draws correlations between carefully researched examples of love in art history and popular culture.
Don't Leave Me This Way, 1498-2022, Zohore meditates on a mother's love and loss. The work pictures an image of African American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner's 1898 painting The Annunciation, obscured by another work by Michelangelo's Pieta, which has had the body of Christ excavated from The Virgin's embrace. This combination creates an illusion of Maddona's perpetual solitude in love. In this convergence on time, Zohore depicts the young virgin emblazoned with love and fear for the life and the light she shepherded in the world and as a wisened mother marked by love and loss. These images intend to challenge the viewer to wonder. "'Tis it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?"
Monsieur Zohore ( b. 1993, Potomac, Maryland )
Zohore's practice in the consumption and digestion of culture through the conflation of domestic quotidian labor and art production. Through performance, video, installation, and sculpture, his practices explore queer history alongside his Ivorian-American heritage through a multi-faceted lens of humor, economics, art history, and labor. Monsieur Zohore received an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2020 and a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York in 2015. Zohore has exhibited his works at venues such as The Phillips Collection (D.C), Jule Collins Smith Museum (Auburn), Art021(Shanghai), Paris Intternatale (Paris), Art Athina (Athens), Sculpture Center (New York), The Clarington Art Center (Canada), Pace (New York), Spurs (Beijing), Tick Tack (Belgium), The Baker Museum (Florida), Socrates Sculpture Park (New York), The Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore), Von Ammon Co (D.C.), The Washington Project for the Arts (D.C), and The Columbus Museum (Ohio). His work is in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; The Bunker Collection, West Palm Beach, FL; Brookfield Collection, New York, NY; The Roux Collection Panama; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (promised gift) and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (promised gift). Monsieur Zohore lives and works in Richmond, VA, New York, NY, and Abidjan, CIV, and is the Assistant Professor of Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University. He lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.
KDR305 is a contemporary exhibition space housed in a 102 yr old cottage in the heart of Little Havana, Miami, FL. The exhibition opens Thursday, December 1st, 7-11 PM. Rideshare is encouraged as there is limited public street parking.
For images, information and appointments, please contact katia@kdr305.com.
