Calida Rawles: On the Other Side of Everything

The first New York solo show of the artist Calida Rawles, “On the Other Side of Everything” features four new paintings continuing the artist’s look at the relationships between race, narrative, and positionally through works depicting Black subjects submerged in bodies of water. Part of Lehmann Maupin’s In Focus series, the exhibition (on view through October 23) presents works that continue Rawles’s use of themes like water, memory, history, and the natural world. With a title inspired by Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, the artist’s most abstracted paintings to date including those like The Lightness of Darkness, which depicts a male figure in dress attire, floating just below the water’s surface, distorted by the markings of mirrored light reflecting off the water.