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Clotilde Jiménez
Mariane Ibrahim Gallery
“The Contest,” Clotilde Jiménez’s first solo exhibition at Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, featured eleven prodigiously sized collages and a quartet of bronze busts. Jiménez’s robust figurative oeuvre has consistently highlighted the intersectionality of queerness, blackness, class, religion, and Hispanic heritage. This show continued such investigations, but they were sifted through a more personal narrative: The artist described his presentation as an “open letter” to his formerly estranged father.
For the collages, Jiménez assembled a range of materials—including fabric, plastic, charcoal, and acrylic paint—to build a series of bulky athletic bodies complete with uniforms and equipment as a means of implicating competition and sports, pastimes that have conventionally bonded fathers and sons. Yet the activities highlighted across these works—boxing, bodybuilding—also figure prominently within the visual history of homoerotic art: Think, for instance, of photographer Bob Mizer’s glistening muscular gym rats, George Bellows’s oil paintings of handsome bloodied pugilists, or Collier Schorr’s photographs of bruised...