Solo exhibition, Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam
For the past three decades, Remy Jungerman’s practice has involved returning, again and again, to his roots in Suriname to create a visual language that connects the forms and patterns from his country of origin to those seen in other art forms throughout the African diaspora as wellas in 20th Century Modernism.
In the summer of 2023, drawn by similarities he saw in the rich geometry displayed in the patchwork shoulder capes of theSurinamese Maroons to the quilts made by the women of Gee’s Bend, he traveled to the small town of Gee’s Bend (now called Boykin), that sits on a bend in theAlabama River. Like the Maroons, the inhabitants of Boykin are—to this day—nearly all descendants of enslaved people who worked on a plantation owned by JosephGee. Jungerman attended a quilting retreat hosted by two master Gee’s Bend quilters and this experience marked adistinct shift in his practice. He realized that he has been incorporating quilt-making tools and processes in his work for decades without quite realizing it.
In his new body of work on view in What theRiver Says, Jungerman “stitches together” small squares or strips of textile soaked in kaolin clay, applying them to wood panels in his wall pieces or in his free-standing cube works, and then scratching away at or literally“cutting out” fragments of the wood panels themselves to reveal the many layers beneath the surface. Powerfully weaving together threads of the African diaspora, in these new works Jungerman, imagines that visual memories from WestAfrica were carried by enslaved people across the ocean to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade.
