David Krut Projects Artspace, New York is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by Christopher Cozier opening November 14, 2024. Early editioned works of Cozier’s extended “Tropical Night” series will be exhibited for the first time in New York with earlier works on paper.
Christopher Cozier is a Trinidad-based visual artist, curator and writer working in various mediums including drawing, printmaking, installation and video. Recognized as a leading Caribbean artist, whose writing and curatorial practice have been key in framing Caribbean art within a global imaginary, Cozier’s works are currently on exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, with MoMA having acquired more than 260 individual notebook drawings from his extensive “Tropical Night Series” (2006-2014). The works in this show are reflective of the artist’s thinking-as-process and signal the route he took towards the “Tropical Night” series.
Cozier spent time in South Africa during the first decade of the country’s post-apartheid era working at Caversham Press in 1999 and again from 2000-2001 with Malcolm Christian. There he developed the “I Find Myself Wandering/Wondering” series, creating two screenprint editions including a book that drew on Trinidad’s 1970s-era sound systems as a key conceptual idea. It is in this series where the idea for “Tropical Night” began to take form. Another key moment occurred when he returned to South Africa in 2011 and collaborated with David Krut Workshop in Johannesburg to create a series of linocuts and monotypes titled “All That Talk.” This work was created after the initial exhibition of the growing “Tropical Night” series, first at the “Infinite Island” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum (2007) and then in “Afro-Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic” at Tate Liverpool (2010). Later in 2011, working with a musician and the early baseline music sheets for reggae and Trinidad calypso from the 1950s, Cozier produced a series of eight small screenprints titled “All That’s Left” with Luther Davis at Axelle Fine Arts in Brooklyn, extending the visual language he had developed in South Africa in 2001.
Our current exhibition, “Christopher Cozier: I Find Myself Wandering/Wondering” allows us to reunite with the artist a decade after our 2013 exhibition “In Development.” It brings together a selection of prints and drawings that not only reflects his multi-year journey towards “Tropical Night,” but is also deeply resonant with his broader contemporary practice. Cozier’s art continues to explore ideas and conditions central to post independent former colonies within a unique and deeply prismatic contemporary space, tethered to Caribbean modern forms and resonating globally. The exhibition will present the artist’s early editioned print works, and an iconic artist book “I Find Myself Wandering.”
