Ekow Eshun’s favourite work from Frieze Sculpture 2024
The chairman of the Fourth Plinth introduces Woody De Othello's seeing both sides from this year’s presentation in The Regent’s Park
The chairman of the Fourth Plinth introduces Woody De Othello's seeing both sides from this year’s presentation in The Regent’s Park
Like many of Woody De Othello’s sculptures, seeing both sides, with its multiple limbs, extends in many directions at once.
The artwork is typical of the breadth of reference that Othello brings to his practice, from free jazz and surrealism to Haitian and Vodou folklore and belief systems, and the animistic face jugs made by enslaved Black potters in South Carolina in the 1860s. His sculptures seem to me like visitations from an African diasporic world predicated on dream, fable and myth.
I’m reminded of Suzanne Césaire, the theorist of surrealism and négritude, who wrote in transcendent prose of the necessity to embrace ‘the domain of the strange, the marvellous and the fantastic. Here is the freed image, dazzling and beautiful, with a beauty that could not be more unexpected and overwhelming. Here are the poet, the painter and the artist, presiding over the metamorphoses and the inversions of the world under the sign of hallucination and madness.’
About Ekow Eshun
Ekow Eshun is chairman of the Fourth Plinth, overseeing Britain’s foremost public art programme, and the former director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. He is a judge for the Turner Prize 2024 and was a member of the jury for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2024. His new book The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them, is out now.
Frieze Sculpture is in The Regent’s Park, 18 September – 27 October 2024. No booking required, free to all.
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Frieze Sculpture runs alongside Frieze London & Frieze Masters in The Regent’s Park, 9 – 13 October.
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