Artist-to-Artist: Deborah Anzinger Proposed by Simone Leigh

'Deborah’s bold paintings and sculptures are saturated with metaphor and questioning. She helps to make a theoretical Caribbean history and epistemology visible.' – Simone Leigh

Presented by Nicola Vassell Gallery at Frieze London

Untitled Transmutations is a new body of works made with pigments ground from local cookshop charcoal, an essential but undervalued and loosely protected natural resource in Jamaica. Within these paintings, charcoal transforms from its intrinsic and urgent worth as fuel for survival in local informal economies, into an aesthetic gesture whose worth is tied to a different set of parameters. Connected to her in situ sculpture Training Station, Maroon Town, Jamaica, which involves reforestation efforts on ancestral family land, Untitled Transmutations enact the cyclic connection of human lives to land and non-human life forms while also continuing the building of a visual language for reconfiguring how the body is understood beyond the paradigm of imperialism.

Leigh writes: 'Deborah Anzinger is an artist whose bold paintings and sculpture are saturated with metaphor and questioning. Deborah is an autodidact who began her career studying proto-carnivorous plants and ultimately completed a PhD focused on HIV neuro-pathogenisis. She is an artist who operates in a global south style, assuming roles as community organizer and organization builder. She is the founder of New Local Space, Kingston, Jamaica. She makes practical and theoretical connections with the work of Erna Brodber, Gaama Gloria ‘MaMa G’ Simms and Sylvia Wynter, helping make a Caribbean theoretical history and epistemology more visible. I cannot think of a more important artist right now.'

Deborah Anzinger

b. 1978, Jamaican; lives and works in Kingston

Deborah Anzinger is an artist and founder of art organisation New Local Space (NLS), Kingston, Jamaica. Anzinger works in painting, sculpture, video and sound to interrogate and reconfigure raced and gendered aesthetic syntax that relate us to space and each other. Her work navigates subjecthood as a social and ecological contested space.

Simone Leigh

b. 1967, American; lives and works in New York

Simone Leigh is an artist who has had solo shows and works on display at the Guggenheim Museum, the Hammer Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Whitney Biennial, among others. In 2022, she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, where she also received the Golden Lion for her participation in the central exhibition. This spring, her twenty-year career survey exhibition opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; it will subsequently travel to the Hirshhorn, in Washington, D.C., and to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the California African American Museum, in L.A. 

Further Information

Frieze London takes place concurrently with Frieze Masters from 11–15 October in The Regent’s Park, London.

To keep up to date on all the latest news from Frieze, sign up to the newsletter at frieze.com, and follow @friezeofficial on Instagram and Twitter, and Frieze Official on Facebook.

Tickets

Early-bird tickets to the fairs are now sold out. Limited full-price tickets have just been released. Don’t miss out, book yours now.

BUY TICKETS NOW

_{Main Image: Deborah Anzinger, Untitled Transmutation 02, 2022, ground local cookshop charcoal on paper, 64 × 64 cm}