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First Flight, 2021
Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to present First Flight, a viewing room featuring new paintings by Asif Hoque. Engaging with painting’s traditions, Hoque’s scenes of over-the-top romance and lush landscapes recast characters, stories and themes from ancient mythology and folklore to feature brown-bodied heroes and heroines.
Hoque’s First Flight explores the artist’s experience of first love through a series of mythological tableaux. Even in its hybrid forms, Hoque’s primary subject is the human body, painted in the nude with a focus on flesh. The exaggerated proportions of his bodies amplify depictions of affection between lovers, while the backgrounds of exposed linen reinforce a formal focus on the figure and hint at their existence outside the limits of time. His paintings both represent his experience of the world and the creation of his own world, celebrating the powers of the imagination, as well as the powers of the artist to visualize a more liberated society for everyone.
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Everything is Love, 2020-2021
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Appearing sometimes as autobiographical representations, Hoque may imagine himself or others as creatures from Coptic or Western folklore, such as winged cherubim and sphinx. Everything Is Love presents a pair of quarreling griffins locked in embrace. “While it may look like a fight, it is really everything that a relationship is,” explains Hoque. Other examples include First Flight, showing a baby cub being guided into flight by the song of a lovebird, or Take me where your heart goes…, where the lovebird reappears, now with its soulmate. Inspired in part by the cover art of Beyoncé's executive-produced album The Lion King: The Gift, Hoque’s flying griffins carry a sense of symbolism and power: Two halves of a unified circle, inseparable even in conflict, and speaking to Hoque’s visualizations of love and unity here on earth.
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In his vase studies, Hoque presents the risk and temptation of placing the object of one’s desires on a pedestal. The divine female figure turns away and ascends a cloud, as light from the vase reflects across the granite surface. Having grown up in Rome, Hoque expands iconographies of Classical Art to include different histories and multiple narratives, such as his Bangladeshi ancestry and distillations of his contemporary life in Brooklyn.
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In Goddess of Love, the elongated limbs of the figure reach across the canvas, just as mountaintops roll into the distance, suggesting that neither earth nor sky nor the experience of love can be constrained. Titles of other paintings may come from the name of music records, such as R&B singer Giveon’s Stuck On You, or may draw from personal memories, such as the chosen fragrance of a past lover in Santal 33. Filled with swirling patterns, the artist’s gentle contour lines denote fantastic musculature, while the action of his landscapes expresses hidden emotions. For Hoque, the painted figure and theme of love function as the space for free association, play, and invention, with feeling conveyed through warm earth-tones, flowing hair, soft gazes with almond eyes, and his circular, squiggly line work.
Goddess of Love, 2021 -
Solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have previously been presented at Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL, and New Image Art, Los Angeles, CA. Hoque was born in 1991 in Rome, Italy, and grew up in South Florida. He studied painting at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, where he currently lives and works.
