Hervé Télémaque: 1959–1964

Gean Moreno has curated this exhibition of work by the Haitian-born artist Hervé Télémaque, which features more than a dozen paintings from Télémaque’s first handful of years working as an artist after he moved from Haiti to New York just two years prior, in 1957. The works on view demonstrate not only the turbulence in the artist’s life during this transition, but the formative years of a practice that spanned movements like abstraction, Pop art, and assemblage, as well as topics of race, sexuality, colonialist tendencies and the problems that occur in everyday life as a result of these themes. Télémaque relocated to Paris in 1961, and the works on view (such as the 1960 Othello or My Darling Clementine from 1963) help suggest a narrative of his creative evolution and influences, which included names like Wifredo Lam, Öyvind Fahlström, and Bernard Rancillac.