SURFACE MAGAZINE
Long before Kanye West used it for the album cover of Donda, the black square has been symbolic throughout art history—whether it was Ad Reinhardt’s series of black abstract paintings in the 1960s, or even in 1915, when Kasimir Malevich created the Black Square.
Adding new perspective to this conversation is Alteronce Gumby, a Bronx-based artist who’s exhibiting a never-before-seen series of artworks with Berlin’s Bode Projects atMexico City art fair Zona Maco (Feb. 9–13) that reflect on history’s relationship to the color black, and its meaning today through a Black artist’s gaze. “I was thinking about the history of monochromatic painting and black paintings,” Gumby tells Surface. “I was noticing the conversation from artists, from Malevich in the 1920s to non-objective art in the 1960s and ‘70s. It was all impersonal—they all considered the color black to almost be like a void, something without meaning. Ad Reinhardt described it as a vacuum.”
ARTSY
Standing in front of Alteronce Gumby’s painting Black Star (2019) is what it must feel like to be enveloped in the Milky Way. A whipped palette of dark metallics filled with mystery and mysticism cascade across a lightning-bolt shaped canvas. The shades are both indeterminate and intoxicating. With each velveteen brushstroke, the artist unearths the nuanced tones that live deep within colors. Through his abstract paintings, Gumby takes viewers on an odyssey beyond the provincial politics of the present, nudging open the door to worlds both within ourselves and well beyond this one.
The BROOKLYN RAIL
Alteronce Gumby is a painter of (be)dazzling abstractions. Painstakingly constructed from glass tesserae, his shaped paintings evoke drifts of cosmic dust. Imagine a confab between Alma Thomas, Jack Whitten and Howardina Pindell deep in the Hall of Gems.I first met Alteronce when he was an undergrad painter at Hunter College. His devotion to the monochrome and a kind of “pure” abstraction was striking even then. Gumby has spent the past decade developing a body of work that mines both the sensation and symbolism of color.
DAZED
Alteronce Gumby is captivated by the endless speculative configurations of meaning, memory, and subjective association that colours can embody. “Colour is such a beautifully complex thing,” he tells Dazed. “When I was a kid in class, I told everyone that my favourite colour was black and another student responded, ‘That’s because you’re Black.’ But the real reason was that my favourite superhero was Batman.”
FRIEZE
“For me, putting these pieces of glass together was also a metaphor for putting myself together, especially in terms of my relationship to the cosmos and astrology. But then I’m also trying to redefine myself through colour, through abstraction, though the process of painting. Each piece of glass that I place symbolizes a moment of my life that has accumulated to form who I am as an individual sitting in front of you today.”
-Alteronce Gumby
Vogue Magazine
Color is a preoccupation for most painters. For Bronx-based artist Alteronce Gumby, it’s an obsession. In “Somewhere Under the Rainbow/ The Sky Is Blue and What Am I,” a dual-site exhibition that opens today at New York galleries Charles Moffett and False Flag, Gumby interrogates the subjectivity of light. The large monochromatic works, 15 in total, are constructed from acrylic paint, glass, and uncut gemstones.
Cultured Mag
Once a week, as part of the Kossak Painting Program—a fellowship at Hunter College composed of 10 or 12 painting students—Alteronce Gumby would bring a painting or two to class to be critiqued by renowned visiting artists such as Rashid Johnson and Katherine Bernhardt.
Artnet News
Alteronce Gumby spends his days in his Bronx studio engaged in an intricate process of setting small pieces of broken glass into his jewel-like abstract paintings. Sometimes shaped like plinths or zigzags, his acrylic-and-glass works seem to hint at Minimalism’s legacy. The glittering reflections of their surfaces, meanwhile, conjure up the seemingly conflicting images of Byzantine mosaics and shattered storefront windows and car windshields at once.