Galerie Maximilian showcases Black artists with new show

Galerie Maximilian is starting the weekend off right, with champagne, caviar, chocolate, and a conceptual art show. The exhibition predominantly pays tribute to Black artists who are finally receiving the recognition they deserve but who were largely overlooking during their early careers.

It includes works by McArthur Binion, Stanley Whitney, Charles Gaines, Samuel Levi Jones, Mel Bochner, and Idris Kahn. The latter two are not Black, but their work fits into the theme, which revolves around geometrics.

“Because they didn’t get the critical acclaim that they were due, these artists’ careers languished,” said Albert Sanford, owner of Galerie Maximilian, adding that it was just in the last decade or so that galleries — and society, in general — started acknowledging the diversity of talent outside of white males.

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As part of the show, the gallery unveils six different prints by Binion. Born in 1946, he produced work in the 1960s and ’70s to no critical acclaim. Poetry and bebop jazz influenced his art, which oscillates between improvisation and order and direct biography and abstraction.

“He did art quietly, almost subversively,” Sanford said.

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Using oil-based paint stick, ink, and graphite, he incorporated densely interlaced grids into tiled reproductions of personal photographs and documents, including his address book.

“He would hide the names under geometric color patterns. (It speaks to) the notion of Blacks hiding or subverting themselves, especially in the art world,” Sanford said.

In the early 1970s, Gaines began exploring mathematics to create numbered marks in ink on a grid. Each drawing built upon the calculations of the prior. The politics of identity emerges as an underlying theme in his work, addressing issues of race. His plexiglass boxes portray trees made up of spots of color, systematically dabbed with hundreds upon hundreds of touches. Tiny numbers within the pieces correspond to each color he employs.

“It’s really about the systematic organization of the colors and the racial implication under the surface,” Sanford said, adding that he came to Aspen last summer, when Anderson Ranch honored him. “He’s really an important artist. His works are selling from half a million to $1 million.”

Whitney focuses on the possibilities of color and form by organizing saturated color fields into grids, which he separates by gestural lines.

“It’s (also) about a system and organization.  Both artists have a similarity, but they manifest the works in different ways,” Sanford said.

Born in 1978 when most of these artists were producing works, Jones has been inspired by his predecessors.

By taking text from encyclopedias and legal, medical, and other professional textbooks and then scrubbing, bleaching, repainting, and stitching them together into geometric patterns, he explores control, manipulation, and exclusion verses equality within society’s power structures.

“Essentially, he is scrubbing, or washing, that history away,” Sanford said.

Visually, Kahn’s 12-piece new project, “The Four Seasons,” pays homage to Josef Albers, one of the most influential 20^th-century art teachers in the nation.

“Idris was very inspired by the geometry in his work and the use of color and abstraction,” Sanford said.

He draws on diverse cultural text and musical scores, densely layering the imagery to portray history and human experience. He might incorporate pages from the Qur’an or reproductions of Caravaggio paintings, controlling the contrast, brightness, and opacity digitally, resulting in visually rich pieces.

Bochner was one of the predominant conceptual art leaders in the 1960s and ’70s. He strayed from abstract expressionism and traditional composition by introducing language into the visual realm. His work invites viewers to consider how we understand both language and painting, as well as how they relate to one another, in an attempt to draw attention to unspoken conventions the underlie how we engage with the world.

“He’s all about using text in a whimsical and amusing way, but there is also this idea of formality in his work,” Sanford said. “I don’t think people think much about his early motivations, but when you read about him, there’s something more profound behind (his art).”

For example, his 2024 monoprint “Ha Ha Ha” might be read as Ah, Ah, Ah, he pointed out.

Founded in 1997, the gallery always has aimed to showcase new and different work, all of which Sanford loves and believes in so much that he purchases it.

“We own all of the work we present, and we’re constantly changing the gallery with work we’ve invested in,” he said, adding that one thing he’s always believed in is demystifying art and making it accessible to people.