Harper’s is pleased to announce The fringe, New York-based artist Ricky Burrows’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The presentation features fourteen new paintings by Burrows and opens Thursday, July 25, 6–8pm with a reception attended by the artist.

Across The fringe, Burrows paints emotive tableaux of Black American perseverance in the face of material hardship. These charged scenes are influenced by the artist’s memories of his upbringing in New York City and Connecticut. Taking a close look at the figures and environments that color socio-economic precarity, Burrows captures the realities of life in the margins. The fringe is a necessary portrait of human strife and endurance: the protagonists of these stirring works tirelessly trouble their unfavorable conditions.

With spray paint, acrylic, and pastels, Burrows renders vulnerable moments in public life, conjuring the landscape of loss that haunts interior thought and seeps into collectivity. The subjects represented within The fringegrieve and overcome calamity across public spaces. In one painting, we witness a woman waiting in an intake office analogous to the kinds of administrative rooms found in facilities for community services. With a downcast gaze and a harrowing frown, her disposition seems entrenched in mourning. Burrows illustrates the waiting room with a keen awareness of palette: a combination of earthy yellows and clinical black and white pigment remark on the fluorescent sterility of these urgent support spaces for crisis management. It’s within these homogenous agencies that communities far and wide find critical resources for survival.

In another moving work, death provokes a public ceremony held on the street. Burrows paints a group of men and women fitted in formalwear as they gather around a portrait of a young man. The scene illustrates an outdoor procession, commemorating the life of a loved one who transitioned too soon. Burrows’s color selection is rife with deep crimson and auburn here, evoking a melancholic mood in this depiction of collective grief. In this work and throughout, Burrows strikes an enrapturing timber with his distinctive approach to figuration. Paring down the human form into expressive characters teeming with raw emotion, he recalls the distorted visual language of twentieth-century abstract expressionism.

Abstracted figuration is a necessary tool of translation for Burrows. The textured tradition—with its infinite capacity for interpretation and reinterpretation—invites him to design the iconography of racial marginality. With The Fringe, Burrows communicates an arresting aesthetic of economic dispossession. His powerful figures and salient symbols of impoverished domestic life reckon with the affective qualities of misfortune. Ultimately, this rigorous exhibition challenges viewers to consider the settings and customs that encourage survival, despite the looming threat of adversity.

Ricky Burrows (b. 1995, Brooklyn, NY) is a self-taught artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. Most recently, his work has been exhibited at Harper’s, Los Angeles and New York (2024 and 2023); EXPO Chicago (2024); Ursa Gallery, Bridgeport (2023); ArtSpace, Hartford (2018); Stockman Gallery, New Britain, CT (2017); and Elusie Gallery, Easthampton, MA (2016). Burrows’ work has been featured in publications including Lux magazine, Vestal magazine, and Man repeller.