Awol Erizku: Hammer, Stick, Same thang (2017)
Price AUD$1700.00 | Limited Edition Price CAD$1650.00 | Limited Edition Price £950.00 | Limited Edition Price T1250.00 | Limited Edition Price USD$1250.00 | Limited Edition
Print: Six-color full-bleed silkscreen on Coventry Rag 335gsm
Size: 610 x 508 mm (24 x 20 in)
This work is a varied edition of 50, of which 25 are blue and 25 are yellow
This work is signed on a label adhered on verso
Edition prices will increase as they sell
Hammer, Stick, Same thang, 2017 is an edition that is based off an original painting. In this work, Awol has appropriated the iconic arm & hammer image and logo which is both localized and ubiquitous and appears across the country in interchangeable locales, signifying a variety of ethnicities and communities. Stripping the logo of its relationship to the ancient mythologies and products and the surrounding urban landscapes, it becomes both a meditation on post-Warholian production, and a response to color theory recalling Joseph Albers' pedagogical exercises that influenced Erizku when he was a student at Cooper Union. The original artwork was painted on sheets of OSB instead of canvas and teeters on the divide between the studio and the street responding to different moments in art history, as well as the constantly evolving surface of the city.
Awol Erizku (b. 1988, Addis Ababa) is a conceptual artist who received his B.A. from Cooper Union in 2010 and his M.F.A from Yale in 2014. He has exhibited recently at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. He has lectured in conjunction with Carrie Mae Weems at The Guggenheim, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Menace II Society at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, Make America Great Again at Ben Brown Fine Arts, London, New Flower | Images of the reclining Venus at The FLAG Art Foundation, New York and Bad II the Bone presented at nomadic exhibition venue, Duchamp Detox Clinic, by Night Gallery. Erizku lives and works in Los Angeles.