Alexis Peskine is the recipient of several prestigious prizes including a Fulbright scholarship and the Hennessy Black Masters Art Competition award. In the past decade, Peskine has worked with inner-city youth in France, Senegal, and Brazil to create several monumental pieces. His works were featured in the exhibition In Their Own Form at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and Africa House’s Second Generation exhibition in New York in 2018. The artist presented his work in Tiny Traces at the Foundling Museum, London, UK in 2022 – 2023. Peskine’s film, The Raft of Medusa, was exhibited in A Gateway To Possible Worlds, which brought together over 200 works at Centre Pompidou-Metz, France in 2022 – 2023. His work was included in the landmark exhibition Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK in 2023 – 2024.
October Gallery presents Forest Figures, a much-anticipated solo exhibition of new works by Peskine. This, the artist’s third show at October Gallery, will intersect with the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, taking place at Somerset House, in London, from 10th – 13th October. Forest Figures delves into the rich, healing powers inherent in ancestral African spirituality; exploring deeper aspects of interiorised abundance and wellbeing found amongst the individual figures he portrays to represent the diversity of the African diaspora. Peskine’s large-scale mixed media ‘portraits’ are rendered by hammering nails of different gauge, with pin-point accuracy, into wooden ‘canvases’. He links these extraordinary portraits to the spiritually charged Minkisi ‘power figures’ of the Congo Basin. The application of Japanese oxidised gold, silver and palladium leaf to the heads of the nails lends a luminous quality to each work.
The show runs from 3rd October to 9th November, with Private Viewing on Friday 11th October, 2024. For more information, please visit the October Gallery website.
Alexis Peskine
Séetal, 2024.
White and black paint, archival varnish, 24k gold leaf and nails on wood,
150 x 111 cm.
© Alexis Peskine.
Courtesy the Artist and October Gallery, London.
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