Lavar Munroe: Promised Land
Larkin Durey is delighted to present an exhibition of new work by Lavar Munroe. This is the artist’s tenth solo show with the gallery.
Lavar Munroe works in the spirit of an anthropologist, studying the human condition via intensive, immersive travels across the African continent and a similar sense of discovery in his studio. His work attests to the power of storytelling, folklore, fable and community, illuminating the threads that weave us together across culture, time and geography, and spark our collective imagination.
Over the past decade, Munroe has travelled to meet communities in Tanzania, Senegal and Zimbabwe, integrating with local people and experiencing first-hand the rituals, ceremonies and traditions that underpin their belief systems and identities. “Research, in my instance, is travel research,” he says. “I go into a space to observe and learn.” A 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship has helped develop his fascination with the peoples of Zimbabwe, where a recent visit allowed him to participate in a Shona all-night ‘bira’ ceremony which, via an intoxicating blend of music, dance, food, clapping and snuff, sought to summon and consult the spirit of a deceased person via a spirit medium.
In this current body of work, Munroe investigates the potency of the procession or parade, as a performance of power and a celebratory space of joy. In all instances, he is fascinated by the interplay of music and movement, costumes, food, the swell of the crowd - and the narratives spun by these combined elements. Returning to the studio from his travels, Munroe employs a wide variety of carefully collected materials to convey something of the sensory journey he has experienced and bring it to life. As he explains, “…it becomes like a conversation between myself, the paint and the canvas.”
Glass, newspapers, crocheted and synthetic flowers, feathers and jewellery - all familiar materials from Munroe’s Bahamian childhood and the local Junkanoo festivals - are combined on the canvas with acrylic, house paint and oil pastel to create a tapestry of overlapping worlds in which the spiritual and elemental sit in harmony with the everyday. A developing fascination with the airbrush technique adds a fluid, richly pigmented dimension to the contours and surfaces on the canvas.
Munroe was born in 1982. He works between Baltimore, USA and Nassau, Bahamas. Recent solo exhibitions include Walters Museum of Art, Baltimore, USA; Meadows Museum of Art, Shreveport, USA; and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, USA. Notable group shows and biennales include Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland, The Wright, Detroit, USA, The National Art Gallery of the Bahamas; Centre Pompidou Metz, France; Perez Art Museum Miami, USA; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, USA; the ‘Prospect 4’ triennial, New Orleans, directed by Trevor Schoonmaker; and All the World’s Futures’, 56th Venice Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor. His work is in the collections of The Baltimore Museum of Art, USA; Studio Museum of Harlem, New York; The National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, Nassau; and the MAXXI Museum, Rome, Italy.
In 2024, Munroe was awarded the Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Award and in 2023 he was named a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, underwritten by Robert De Niro.
