“The Modern:Ancient:Brown work...I’ve been waiting many years for this, I’ve been waiting all my life.”
―McArthur Binion

Lehmann Maupin will present Modern:Ancient:Brown, an exhibition of new work by McArthur Binion featuring a series of multicolor paintings that represent a culmination of the artist’s decades-long exploration of color. Over the last 40 years Binion has produced an expansive body of work that engages language, African American history, identity, color theory, and the genres of modernism, minimalism, and geometric abstraction in ways that are intensely personal and dedicated to the rigorous process of painting. Often combining elements of collage with drawing, oil stick, and ink, Binion’s autobiographical abstractions are comprised of minimalist grids that are layered over an “underconscious” of personal documents and photographs―including photocopies of his birth certificate, pages from his 1970–1990’s address book, pictures from his childhood, and found photographs of lynchings. In Modern:Ancient:Brown Binion continues this practice, layering grids, bands, and tiles of color over an underconscious that includes much of this past material with the addition of select self portraits, bringing the full expanse of his palette to bear in each individual work.