The court, the ball and the hoop: Barkley Hendricks paints basketball
The third installment in Skira and Jack Shainman Gallery's five-volume overview of American artist Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) explores the artist's relationship to basketball, which provided a significant source of artistic inspiration throughout his life.
In his Basketball series, Hendricks applied his keen compositional sense and stylish use of color to depictions of the sport's essential elements: hoops, nets, backboards and, of course, basketballs themselves. In one painting, the image of a basketball about to make its way into a hoop is repeated twice on a round canvas; on another circular canvas, the iconic black ribs of a basketball are rendered in a bold orange to create a minimalistic yet instantly recognizable pattern.
A study in movement and geometry, Hendricks' paintings offer a uniquely compelling perspective on the sport as an artistic pursuit. This book's focus on this aspect of Hendricks' work allows for a detail-oriented study of the artist's techniques as a painter.
About the Author
Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) is an artist profoundly integral and pivotal to art and African-American culture. Barkley L. Hendricks was a painter and photographer best known for his realist and post-modern portraits of people of color living in urban areas beginning in the 1960s and 70s and continuing to the present. Hendricks was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and lived and worked in New London, Connecticut.
He earned both his BFA and MFA from Yale University and was the subject of a large-scale traveling exhibition, Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool, organized by Trevor Schoonmaker at the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (2008), which traveled to the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2008-2009), Santa Monica Museum of Art, California (2009), Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (2009-2010) and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas (2010).
His work is included in numerous public collections both within the United States and abroad, such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; The Tate Modern, London, UK; Studio Museum, Harlem, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; and the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.Jack Shainman Gallery has represented Hendricks since 2009.
His solo exhibitions at Jack Shainman Gallery include Heart Hands Eyes Mind (2013), Barkley L. Hendricks (2016) and Them Changes (2018).
Industry Reviews
A celebration of both sport and community, paintings like "Still Life #5" (1968), with an isolated orange basketball against a white backboard, or the backboard-triptych "Father, Son, and ..." (1969) also contain a sly humor, playing against the geometric abstraction of Western modernism and Christian religious paintings.--Martha Schwendener
New York Times
