“Nothing is more gall-bitter than suffering, nothing more honey-sweet than having suffered.” — Meister Eckhart
Devendra Banhart’s barbarous, nonlinear nomenclature is savage in its nonaggression, and completely at peace with its perverse audacity. The recursive abstracted forms within his canvases are a non-hierarchical alphabet of allegories for the diminishment and destruction of ego. Each mouth, prick, eye, and ass breaks apart and reconstructs itself until they become a collective commune of equally all-important, yet weightless pieces of the tantric universe. They are a cycle of mala beads through the fingers of time.
The Grief I Have Caused You, Banhart’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, is a survey of recent paintings and drawings mostly completed during a year when the Grand Pendulum neglected to swing back to “having suffered.” Though they were sowed in a moment of near-universal hurt, each composition manifests an equal, harmonic measure of joy: grotesque figurations of comedy and tragedy embrace and approach fellatio in “Nyima & Dawa,” 2021; a fat-bottomed, high-heeled hiker rejoices at a finally flat stretch of terrain while a behemoth of a feline looms menacingly overhead in “Twilight Hiker,” 2021; “Offering,” 2021, is a total deconstruction of the elements represented within the first two, a Buddhist garden partially digested by the biome of infinity. (Banhart’s flora includes the cubist and surrealist tendencies of Paul Klee, the expressionistic poetry of Helen Frankenthaler, and the violent gestures of Ethel Schwabacher, to name a few.)
If time is a circular property, then the human condition is a perennial state of suffering and having suffered, often and increasingly all at once. The Grief I Have Caused You is the artist’s rumination on the uniquely personal, yet absolute universality of this push-and-pull. His grief is your grief, but so is his ecstasy.
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Devendra Banhart (b. 1980, Houston, Texas) lives and works in Los Angeles. An internationally renowned musician considered a pioneer of the “freak folk” and “New Weird America” movements, Banhart has toured, performed, and collaborated with Vashti Bunyan, Yoko Ono, Os Mutantes, Swans, ANOHNI, Caetano Veloso, and Beck, amongst many others. His musical work has always existed symbiotically alongside his pursuits in the other fine arts. In addition to painting and drawing most of his own album covers (the album artwork for his 2010 album What Will We Be was nominated for a Grammy), he has contributed to Doug Aitken’s multimedia Station to Station project. He has performed at MoMA (New York), MoCA (Los Angeles), The Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), LACMA (Los Angeles), and The Broad Museum (Los Angeles). Exhibitions include Voglio proprio vedere, Mazzoli, Modena, Italy (2017); Sphinx Interiors & Other Works, Mazzoli, Modena, Italy (2014, solo); Abstract Rhythms: Paul Klee and Devendra Banhart, SFMoMA, San Francisco (2007–2008); Music is a Better Noise, MoMA PS1, Queens, New York (2007); and Devendra Banhart, Mazzoli, Modena, Italy (2006, solo). His monograph of drawings and paintings I Left My Noodle on Ramen Street (2015, Prestel) features essays by Jeffrey Deitch and Beck. The Grief I Have Caused You is Banhart’s first solo exhibition with Nicodim, and his first in Los Angeles.
Banhart’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, The Grief I Have Caused You, a startling Cubist-meets-Surrealist amalgamation of works, features Banhart’s signature eclecticism, natural wit, and ambitious talent. We visited the gallery – ah, how we have missed in-person events – and had the chance to catch up with the artist himself, who took some time out to talk to us about NFTs, his love of staying home, and a possible obsession with the Loch Ness Monster.
Many of Devendra’s works in this show liken bodies and figures to empty vessels that fill with emotion and can be let in or out. The use of a torso here gives the viewer a guttural feeling of the guilt of grief felt and perpetuated. In a separate interview, Devendra says of the work, “I thought a lot about how much grief I’ve caused others through my carelessness, selfishness, and unconsciousness—how awful it is to know I’ve caused someone grief, and how awful it is to feel grief that others have caused me.”
The exhibition is rooted in the artist’s study of Chöd Buddhism and the practice of offering up one’s entire body. The painting “The Kiss” (2021) implies a fragmented affinity with the self, a fleshy, double-orificed face folded inwards. Banhart plays with repulsion, figures turning themselves inside out until the body is defamiliarized.
Devendra Banhart’s strange and wonderful exhibition of recent paintings and drawings at Nicodim Gallery in downtown Los Angeles is a rogue’s gallery of surrealist avatars, a pageant of intimately scaled works awash in playful, mischievous mystery.
Devendra just opened his first-ever solo show of paintings, at L.A.’s Nicodim Gallery, and the work is fantastic — we hit him up to talk about art, reincarnated mothers, yaks, “TEMPLE-FRIENDLY” fits, PLUS a jawn so rare it had to be SMUGGLED around the planet.
“Just like making a record, my paintings and drawings—half of them are characters, half of it is made up and just trying to be self-referential while not exactly being me. Some of it has nothing to do with me or baring my soul, and some of it is extremely intimate. Most of the paintings are just me trying to crack myself up. I’m so horrified and depressed. I have to paint disco bears over the ocean just to cheer myself up.” – Devendra Banhart
The result of this highly self-reflective and personal healing work takes shape as abstracted forms and shapes that are completely at peace in their absurdism. Eyes float in a non-hierarchical structure and objects like shoes and balls are woven within curved shapes and deep blues and purples. For an exhibition exploring grief during a time of despair, the work is joyously balanced, embracing grotesque figurations of comedy and tragedy.
Devendra Banhart is an internationally renowned musician and visual artist, considered a pioneer of the “freak folk” and “New Weird America” movements. Curator connected with Banhart on the occasion of The Grief I Have Caused You, his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles at Nicodim Gallery.
The Venezuelan-American musician-painter and the South African multimedia artist talk about their upbringings, inspirations, and making art with a sense of humor in this interview with Michael Slenske.
The recursive abstracted forms within Devendra Banhart’s canvases are a non-hierarchical alphabet of allegories for the diminishment and destruction of ego. Each mouth, prick, eye and ass breaks apart and reconstructs itself until they become a collective commune of equally all-important, yet weightless pieces of the tantric universe.