CURA.

Peres Projects is proud to present STREET PROPHECY, Richard Kennedy’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. The group of new soft sculptures, paintings and busts depict an opera deconstructed into its various parts. Hope, longing, tragedy, comedy, opulence and destruction each play a role, whether formally or through the texts which emerge from the heavily painted canvases and textiles.

The term “opera”, borrowed from the Italian word for “work”, implies a Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) incorporating diverse mediums, collaboration, virtuosity, and drama. Kennedy appropriates and redefines both the multi-media modes of production as well as the dramatic tropes of the “highest art form” of the European tradition to embody a black queer experience. The works in the exhibition hover between abstraction and figuration, self-portraiture and lyrical verse, the historic and the exuberant. We are left with an intangible connection to the experience of excellence within otherness.