Khalif Tahir Thompson: Chilly Winds Don't Blow
Installation View: Khalif Tahir Thompson Chilly Winds Don't Blow, March 28-May 11, 2024 Galerie Zidoun-Bossuyt (51 Rue de Seine) Photography courtesy of Galerie Zidoun-Bossuyt
Chilly Winds Don't Blow, Thompson's third solo exhibition with Zidoun Bossuyt Gallery (the 1st in Dubai, 2nd in Luxembourg), features all new work created while completing his master’s degree at the Yale School of Art (many featured in the monograph too). The work delves further into Thompson's series of portraiture sourced from his own family's photographic archive; these images are transformed & reimagined through the use of layered elements of paper, fabric, and paint, moving towards vividly realized representational forms.
Installation View: Khalif Tahir Thompson Chilly Winds Don't Blow, March 28-May 11, 2024 Galerie Zidoun-Bossuyt (51 Rue de Seine) Photography courtesy of Galerie Zidoun-Bossuyt
In his groups of figures, some are posed, while others are impulsively painted without paying any attention to the painter, all adding to the feeling of immediacy of an artist in love with depicting reality. Despite the vulnerability of his characters, elsewhere, Thompson also depicts isolated figures engulfed in an atmosphere of serenity. His works are also filled with mysterious letters and numbers, these signs echoing the diversity of materials used by the artist.
Installation View: Khalif Tahir Thompson Chilly Winds Don't Blow, March 28-May 11, 2024 Galerie Zidoun-Bossuyt (51 Rue de Seine) Photography courtesy of Galerie Zidoun-Bossuyt
About the Artist:
Khalif Tahir Thompson (b. 1995, NYC) is an African-American painter who just graduated from The Yale School of Art. His work explores notions of self through the scopes of race, sexuality, and spirituality, creating imagery that connects one to the realm of another. He alters perception and invokes empathy towards his subjects, depicting their reality across a visceral lens (subjects include family, friends, and cultural figures placed in constructed settings). Populated by black figures set in colorful, shimmering environments that can resemble patchworks verging on abstraction, his work is also rooted in reality. Painting in oils and acrylics, the artist creates his own paper, which he then applies to the canvas; he also likes to mix in pearls, fabric, velvet, newspaper, and leather to create wonderful material effects. An outstanding portraitist, the artist imbues his figures with a uniquely visual psychological identity, revealing a captivating depiction of figurative portraiture within a deeply defined mood. His palette and use of color are all devices to convey mood and harmony within his imagery, and he believes color works in tandem with texture, weight, and form in telling stories. Gravitating toward warmer earth tones typically found in domestic spaces, he also enjoys expanding into different realms of bright, imaginative color, typical of palettes found in fauvist works. His paintings are currently held in prestigious institutions, including Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, Fl; The Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; The Grant Hill Collection, Orlando, Fl; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO.
For more information about Khalif’s exhibition, please visit the Zidoun Bossuyt Gallery’s website here.
