Howardena Pindell: Circles of Memory, Acts of Transformation
This sweeping retrospective across the Bermondsey galleries presents six decades of Howardena Pindell's extraordinary artistic evolution—a body of work born from trauma and transformed into triumph. From the 1960s to today, her paintings, sculptures, and works on paper reveal an artist who has turned the wounds of racial segregation into weapons of beauty and resistance.
At age eight, during a family road trip through northern Kentucky, Pindell discovered red circles marking the bottom of cups at a roadside stand—a cruel coding system that designated which utensils Black customers were permitted to use under Jim Crow laws. This searing childhood encounter with institutionalized racism would become the genesis of her most powerful artistic vocabulary. The circle, initially a symbol of exclusion and humiliation, became Pindell's chosen instrument of reclamation.
Through obsessive, meditative repetition, she has spent decades transforming this loaded motif into something transcendent. Her circles multiply across canvases as ellipses, perforations, spray-painted constellations, and methodical hole punches—each iteration a small act of defiance, a conscious rewriting of painful memory. What began as markers of segregation become portals of liberation, turning the grid of oppression into a boundless field of possibility.
Renowned American artist Howardena Pindell presents a major solo exhibition spanning six decades of groundbreaking practice, featuring paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from the 1960s to today across the Bermondsey galleries. Following her acclaimed inaugural show at White Cube Hong Kong in November 2024, this comprehensive survey centers on Pindell's fearless exploration of dismantling racial and gender myths through art. The exhibition highlights her revolutionary deconstruction of the grid as a compositional device—transforming this fundamental structure of modernist painting into a powerful tool for social commentary and identity exploration. Through her systematic disassembly and reimagining of artistic conventions, Pindell's work challenges viewers to reconsider how contemporary art can address urgent questions of representation and justice.
Location
White Cube Bermondsey
144 – 152 Bermondsey Street
London SE1 3TQ
Exhibition Description
Pindell's revolutionary approach extends beyond personal healing to collective awakening. Her systematic deconstruction of traditional compositional structures mirrors her dismantling of racial and gender hierarchies, revealing how artistic conventions can be reimagined to serve more inclusive narratives. Through painstaking accumulation and subtraction, addition and erasure, she creates works that pulse with the rhythm of survival and the poetry of persistence. "I endeavoured to change the circle in my mind... to take the sting out of the memory," Pindell has said. This exhibition reveals how she has done far more than remove the sting—she has transformed it into honey, creating art that is both deeply personal and universally resonant, proving that our greatest wounds can become our most powerful sources of creation.
Gallery
White Cube stands at the forefront of contemporary art, representing over 60 distinguished international artists and artist estates across five dynamic cultural capitals: New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong, and Seoul. As a pioneering force in the global art world, the gallery has shaped contemporary discourse through groundbreaking exhibitions and unwavering commitment to artistic excellence.
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