35 Pieces of a Whole Truth

This isn’t the first time that Oakland-based Woody De Othello’s work has been on the international stage, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t hit hard when you see it. It's a complicated time for American artists, and I can’t help but feel there is an interesting role reversal at play right now with most of Europe paying attention to the Americas and the World Cup and the American art world looking to Europe for the Grand Basel of them All. With Jessica Silverman and Karma, De Othello has brought 35 new sculptural works across ceramic, glass, stone, and wood, all “arranged in niches carved into a 12-meter-long freestanding wall” in the heart of the fair. The major new installation, an altar-like wall, comes with the title of two sides that hold truth, is a powerful statement of both the work itself and meaning of the words that name it.

As an expressive sculptor, figurative but with the ability to elongate what we understand as figurative work, in a sense he can paint a sculpture. The title is where I got caught. What was De Othello’s intention? Does each side hold a shard of truth — fractured sunlight through different windows? It highlights that truth can be partial, context-dependent, and shaped by perspective. The work here has the hallmarks of De Othello’s practice: everyday objects with a new aesthetic of both absurdity and importance. They are surreal but real. In a joint statement, the galleries noted this of De Othello’s work here: “Drawing on precolonial African traditions like Dogon art, kemetic philosophy, and spiritual texts, the installation infuses the inanimate with spirited animism, exploring how our emotional lives and collective memories are shaped by our relationship with the material world.”

By amplifying scale, gesture, glaze, and here, the volume of work, De Othello bends the literal toward the uncanny, so that the object no longer simply functions but speaks. The everyday is rendered eloquent and ambivalent; familiarity fractures into feeling, and truth becomes pliant—part observation, part imagination, part memory—revealing how objects carry inward lives we rarely name. He continues to be a playful, serious talent developing the kind of powers of the history books. This is work that feels urgent and timeless. —Evan Pricco