No. 98

Derek Fordjour’s figures have piercing stares: here, against a harlequin backdrop, a man gazes resolutely ahead. His striped jersey clashes vividly with the turquoise and pink diamond ground. Fordjour, who was selected by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, to inaugurate its new outdoor art series in 2022, often paints Black athletes and performers, and the assured composure of the painting’s protagonist resembles that of a champion awaiting his entrance. To create his kaleidoscopic compositions, Fordjour layers paint and pastels with humble materials including newspaper broadsheets; his favourite is The Financial Times. He has at times linked his materials to the hand-me-down clothing that pass through his family, a history which he relishes. Indeed, layering, for Fordjour, is a physical act and a conceptual consideration: he sees these dense accumulations as both a surface intervention and a temporal document. Fordjour seeks to give voice to Black and Brown experiences that have long been marginalised, and—like the palimpsests that he creates—he approaches each painting from a multifaceted perspective, endeavoring to open new ways of thinking about the past and future.