Kasmin is pleased to announce vanessa german: Sad Rapper. The artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, showcasing ambitious new freestanding and wall-based sculpture in an installation that confronts urgent social and political themes of racial oppression, structural violence, commemoration, and community. vanessa german (b. 1976) is a self-taught citizen artist working across sculpture, performance, communal rituals, immersive installation, and photography. Sad Rapper is german’s first exhibition at Kasmin and follows her solo presentation with the gallery at the Independent Art Fair in May 2022. Working primarily with assemblage, german sculpts wood and plaster which she then adorns with a vast range of materials—some found in her community, others sourced from across the country—including prayer beads, doll parts, handmade patterned quilts, skateboards, rope, silk flowers, cowrie shells, coke bottles, vintage porcelain bells, and astroturf. These “ingredients”, as german refers to them, form just one part of each work’s medium, and are listed alongside the metaphysical components that the artist sees as indivisible from the physical objects. Such juxtapositions create complex metaphorical meanings, where the resulting cacophony of language, texture, and image is freighted with both the emotional and the physical; the spiritual and the material. In german’s words, “the objects become both the wound and the medicine.” ✨ @vanessalgerman @kasmingallery ✨ 1-2. VANESSA GERMAN BIRD #1 2022 65 1/2 x 24 x 60 inches 166.4 x 61 x 152.4 cm 3-5. VANESSA GERMAN PENIS GIRL (inspired by whomever is the genius mind behind the PENIS GIRL tag in Portland, Oregon.) 2022 81 3/4 x 39 1/4 x 21 1/2 inches 207.6 x 99.7 x 54.6 cm 6-7. VANESSA GERMAN THE BEAST, or Self Portrait 2022 78 3/4 x 42 x 30 1/2 inches 200 x 106.7 x 77.5 cm 8-9. VANESSA GERMAN THE THREE-HEADED MAN 2022 95 1/4 x 72 1/2 x 20 1/2 inches 241.9 x 184.2 x 52.1 cm 10. Gallery View. #kasmingallery #vanessagerman #saintfleurinc #racialoppression #structuralviolence #blacklife #healingrituals #divinefeminine #tension #patriarchalstructures #mysticimaginations #afrofuturism