from: Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen (DE)
to: La Châtaigneraie, Flémalle (BE)
Dean Sameshima’s Anonymous Portrait works, an ongoing series of painted and printed compositions that the artist began in 2018. Inspired by the first page of John Rechy’s 1977 novel The Sexual Outlaw —which the author dedicated‘to all the anonymous outlaws’—Sameshima’s series references titles from the artist’s personal library of queer, art historical, and critical texts, using each work’s distinct typeface literally and figuratively positioned under a broader umbrella of anonymity. Similar in form and seriality to On Kawara’s Date Paintings, Sameshima’s Anonymous Portraits likewise allow the viewer to project their own impressions onto allusions specific to the paintings’ creator. In this way, Sameshima not only transposes the subjective into the universal, but also preserves a queer archive so frequently discarded due to censorship and fear of discovery.-Text courtesy of PPOW, New York
Dean Sameshima (1971, Torrance, CA) studied at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA and subsequently at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA. Sameshima’s works are in the permanent collections of the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, Cantor Arts Center of Stanford University, Stanford and the Museo de Arte São Paulo, São Paulo. He was honored with the Artist Acquisition Club Award in 2022. The artist lives and works in Berlin.