?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 25,000
AWOL ERIZKU (1988 - ) Boy Holding Grapes.
Digital C-print, 2012. 1003x749 mm; 40x30 inches. Edition of 10 plus two AP.
Boy Holding Grapes is Awol Erizku's clever twist on Caravaggio's Young Sick Bacchus (Bacchino Malato). Dated between 1593 to 1594, Young Sick Bacchus (Bacchino Malato) indicates Caravaggio's physical ailment involving malaria during his first years in Rome but depicts an alluring god of drink and vice. Erizku twists art history to draw attention to the lack of racial diversity represented in the canon and the depiction of the beauty of African Americans.
A photographer with a sharp eye and keen wit, Erizku observed that there weren't many museum masterpieces featuring people of color and set to recreate the classics. "The models I choose to work with are not professional models but possess an undeniable, striking beauty," declares Erizku. His practice bridges the gap between African and African American visual culture, referencing art history, hip hop, and universal human culture.
Erizku received a BFA from The Cooper Union in 2010 and a MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2014. He exhibited at institutions across the country including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include New Visions for Iris, Public Art Fund, New York, NY and Chicago, IL, 2021; Mystic Parallax, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY, 2020; Desire: A Revision from the 20th Century to the Digital Age, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2019. Erizku lives and works in Los Angeles.
