Jeremy Demester

Holzwarth Publications, ISBN 9783947127443,
Hb, 172 pgs, 24 x 29cm
Acqn. 33517
Awaiting stock


£35.00
When artist Jeremy Demester traveled to Ouidah in the West African country of Benin in 2015, he unexpectedly found a resonant new space for his art to grow in. In his engagement with voodoo lore and local culture he found many connections and parallels to his own tzygane roots, giving him new figures and signs that manifested themselves in his paintings and sculptures ever more articulately. The book documents four exhibitions at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin and London and the Musee de la Fondation Zinsou in Ouidah, which follow Demester's process in engaging with unfamiliar motifs in order to discover an individual artistic language that speaks to greater human concerns: we see mask-like ghosts whose faces completely fill the canvases, natural forces that manifest themselves in surprising color contrasts, elements of collaboration with local artists, and abstractions of totemic power. The very basic questions these works ask-where do we come from? where are we? who are we?-are illuminated in an essay by Jean-Marie Gallais, who shows us what this artistic encounter of cultures means from both sides, and how the artist first regarded as "he who enacts his thoughts" became "he who sets his paintings in motion."