Lorraine O’Grady

Body Is the Ground of My Experience

April 28 – June 11, 2022 New York

Alexander Gray Associates, New York announced Lorraine O’Grady: Body Is the Ground of My Experience, an exhibition of the artist’s pivotal 1991 black-and-white photomontages. Drawing on formal strategies of Surrealism and on O’Grady’s own visceral, nuanced engagement with aesthetics, representation, and cultural history, these diptychs are both a turning point, from live performance to wall installation, and a refined iteration of the complex politically and personally radical theses and practices that have occupied the artist throughout her career.

O’Grady produced Body Is the Ground of My Experience for her first one-person exhibition at New York’s INTAR Gallery in 1991—this presentation marks the first time in more than thirty years the complete body of work has been on view in the city. Previously known primarily for her work as a performance artist—with incendiary personas like Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (1980–83), as well as the dream-like Künstlerroman Rivers, First Draft (1982)—the shift to wall works in Body Is the Ground of My Experience marked a major formal evolution in her practice. Rather than being passive, oblique, or annotative, the title of this body of work foregrounds a truth that might no longer be structurally obvious: even as the form of the work changes from physically embodied performances to works on the wall, the body itself remains a conceptual through line and field for engagement.

In works like The Fir-Palm and The Strange Taxi, a Black body operates as a literal ground on which history acts and is unexpectedly modified. This centering of embodied experience is itself an act of resistance against the dry, disassociated formalism of postmodern photography that dominated the landscape at the time. Against this grain, O’Grady constructs imaginative psychologies and uncanny arrangements influenced by Surrealism, a movement whose literature and images she taught for 25 years at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In Dracula and the Artist, a woman with half-styled hair faces away from the viewer, insisting on her right to interiority. Confronting broken combs that fly at her—their sharp teeth evocative of the titular vampire—she turns away from their allure and violence to embrace her art.

Expanding her interrogation of the body as the foundation of experience, O’Grady’s Gaze and Dream quadriptychs are comprised of portraits of eight individuals, each with a second, smaller image of themselves superimposed on top. Given different prompts to react to, each panel of these works functions as a collapsed diptych—schematically enacting both subjectivity’s stunting by history and latent resistance to it. As the curator Stephanie Sparling Williams writes, “The body layering presents to the world two faces of the same individual, and through the artist’s prompting, both an outer and inner view is captured—the metaphysical and the physical.”

Probing the instability of dualities via the subversion and reconfiguration of art historical referents, Body Is the Ground of My Experience generates an uncanny confluence between the artist’s unflinching gaze and the monochromatic, minimal arrangement of her compositions. An embodiment of O’Grady’s artistic ethos, its diptychs illuminate the more universal structures at work as they operate on and are refracted by human bodies across space and history. Created thirty years ago, they bring undeniable resonance to work being created by others today.