Devin Troy Strother

Undercover Brother

October 30 - December 18, 2021

The Pit is pleased to present Undercover Brother, the gallery’s first solo exhibition by LA-based Devin Troy Strother. On view from October 30 – December 18, 2021, with a public reception from 4-7pm on Saturday October 30, this exhibition consists of new paintings and ceramic works.

Here Strother “continues exploring and deviating from what painting is, its cultural significance, and what swishing colors around means to [him] at this point in [his] career.” Paintings adorned with “shelf collections” offer orchestral patterning and shrine-like dimensionality as the artist continues his practice of reclaiming ownership over themes and ideas through replacement, rearrangement, and reconstruction. For example, by over-glazing thrifted figurines that feature nostalgic (and white) caricatures of work, holiday, and respite, Strother distinguishes his “bombastic rebranding” from blatant imitations in lineage with imposter projects that Sturtevant or some Pictures Generation artists have dealt in. He says that, “appropriation isn’t quite the right word. It’s revisionist art history to show a present reality reflective of what I believe the intentions of said works were.” Strother has long loved collage’s potential to create contentious, satirical juxtapositions, and has a history of painting famous white artists’ and actor photos black to ironically confound judgment and to question permission. Is it blackface, and can changing a figurative object’s skin color widen representation? Strother remembers as a child, that his mom painted Santa Clauses black out of necessity. “Severe political zones” like this are rerouted back into conversations about painting in Undercover Brother, whose exhibition title borrows from the film, despite little direct influence. However, in recent research Strother did avidly revisit discursive identity positioning in BlacKkKlansman, White Chicks, and Trading Places; John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me and W.E.B. Dubois’s Black Reconstruction in America.

Strother borrows gestures, images, and themes from Philip Guston as “an entry point back into figurative painting.” The paintings started as master copies, until Strother was compelled to “appropriate and adopt some of Guston’s themes and approaches from his show at Marlborough Gallery in the 1970’s.” Cancel culture and its restrictions on subjectivity disturbs and fascinates Strother; the cancellation of Guston’s recent show, for example, propelled his interest in “further putting myself in the other position. Guston tried to understand the mentality of hate…” Guston’s Klansmen resonate personally with Devin Troy Strother, whose mother’s side of the family left Lake Charles, Louisiana for Los Angeles in part, after harassment by the KKK.

Like Nicole Eisenman and Dana Schutz, Strother continues to populate his artworks with conflicted figures, to create captivating formal and subjective problems through heavy referencing. While Strother may not crank out Guston variants forevermore, the paradoxical realization that on one hand nobody can own styles or aesthetics, while on the other, oppressed populations use reclamation, reinvention, and empowerment as sources of pride and survival will certainly continue as a central motif in Devin Troy Strother’s art.

For inquiries about the exhibition please email info@the-pit.la