I am constructing spaces that I hope viewers will engage with on a spiritual level, feeling the touch of the hands that made the works, both my own and those of my ancestors.

(Remy Jungerman)

In recent years, Remy Jungerman has abandoned the more strict grid lines of his earlier works to explore a more layered, collage-like approach. Each strip of textile in the works in his new exhibition What the River Says builds upon the next, yielding a rhythmic pulse to this new body of work.

For the past three decades, Remy Jungerman’s practice has involved returning, again and again, to his roots in Suriname to create a visual language that connects the forms and patterns from his country of origin to those seen in other art forms throughout the African diaspora as well as in 20th Century Modernism.

In June of 2023, Surinamese Dutch artist Remy Jungerman attended a quilt retreat in Jackson, Mississippi, led by two master quilters from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, Ms. Mary Ann Pettway and Ms. China Pettway. During the retreat, Jungerman created an inventive and hybridized work of art: a quilt inspired by the geometric patterns found in the early twentieth-century patchwork shoulder capes of the Afro- Surinamese Maroons and the famous Gee’s Bend quilts which Black American women in the American South have been perfecting for generations. His personal interactions with the quiltmakers have made a tangible impact on his new body of work, now on view in this exhibition.

Peepina pettaway (2023) is an intricate patchwork of checkered, dotted, and striped fragments of cotton cloth arranged in a syncopated rhythm of strips, bands, bricks, and triangles.

Titled in recognition of the Saamaka Maroon artist Peepina and the artists of Gee’s Bend—many of whom share the surname Pettway—this first and only quilt by Jungerman serves as an ideal medium and metaphor for the concerns that are now taking center stage in his work. Less concerned with navigating a binary relationship of Western and non-Western art forms, Jungerman instead eschews the mediation of colonial forms altogether, looking instead to connections within, between, and across the constellation of African diaspora sites in the Americas.

Jungerman’s recent works represent not only a new direction in his practice, but also an imaginative reunion of visual forms that, like cousins or individual stars within a vast constellation, are both singular and cosmically twinned: uniquely interrelated across the creolized geographies of the African diaspora.

(Allison Young, Professor of Contemporary Art History, Louisiana State University)

Since 2015, Jungerman creates panels in various sizes. he wraps them in plaids of various colors before covering them in kaolin, a fine clay material mined in Moengo, Surinam, and used in Winti as a purifying agent. Jungerman reveals the patterns of the underlying fabric in a variety of geometric variations, often by scoring lines in the kaolin that trace the pattern of the fabric. Sometimes a panel is partly covered in kaolin, other times the fabric is left virtually untouched. Jungerman presents the panels individually, as part of his horizontals, or as multiple compositions.

In the ongoing series he made in 2020 to 2024, he abandons the strict geometric lines and patterns of the earlier works. Adopting a collage-like approach, he glues strips of kaolin- treated fabric to a primed surface. Each strip seems to evoke the next, yielding a rhythmic pulse reminiscent of the repeating sound patterns of the Agida drum—used in Winti rituals— or jazz. This series is the most recent step in the artist’s efforts to create an autonomous visual language informed in equal parts by Suriname, the Netherlands, West Africa and the United States.

In his new body of work on view in What the river says, Jungerman “stitches together” small squares or strips of textile soaked in kaolin clay, applying them to wood panels in his wall pieces or in his free-standing cube works, and then scratching away at or literally “cutting out” fragments of the wood panels themselves to reveal the many layers beneath the surface. Powerfully weaving together threads of the African diaspora, in these new works Jungerman, imagines that visual memories from West Africa were carried by enslaved people across the ocean to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade.

Horizontals

Jungerman’s horizontal works are abstracted altars, inspired by the personal spaces where Winti devotees commune with their spiritual entities, also known as Winti. In keeping with his search for a new visual language rooted in the various cultures that shape his life, Jungerman refers to them neutrally as “horizontals”.

Horizontals are composed of slats of varying length, width, and color, stacked atop one another or attached with small gaps in between. Atop the stacks are small, kaolin-covered panels or narrow boards. Or panels painted a single color, or jugs, or grid works. The slats may have nails sticking out of them, or be wrapped in beads. No matter the variety of additional elements or seeming randomness of a stack’s composition, the works always manifest balance. This stems from Jungerman’s conception of Winti as a means of achieving balance with one’s surroundings.

Cubes

Jungerman’s cube works hint at the further development of his practice of abstraction in his search for an autonomous visual language. Multiple cubes are set one above the other, separated by a small gap. They are wrapped in fabric and partly covered in kaolin. Parts of the original pattern of the fabrics remain untouched and parts are visible only through the translucent layer of kaolin. In his recent cube works, Jungerman plays with the kaolin, blending it with color and pouring it over the cubes as if performing a libation ritual to honor the ancestors.

The new Cubes differ in size, in the number of stacked cubes, in the way the gap is filled, and in the extent to which the kaolin is treated or modified. For Jungerman, the process of making these works is a ritual act: he sometimes encloses pieces of fabric in a cube, other times memories or emotions, the result of which, in either case, is an addition to the works that may not be visible but is nonetheless palpable. The titles of the works, Nkisi and Posu, reference power figures and altars. Much like the Congolese Nkisi Nkondi power figures, Jungerman’s cubes embody vessels of power. They serve as altars, connecting us to ancestors and spirits that guide and inspire.

Remy Jungerman was born in 1959 in Moengo, Suriname. He lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and New York, US. Remy Jungerman attended the Academy for Higher Arts and Cultural Studies in Paramaribo, Surinam, before moving to Amsterdam where he studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy.

In 2022 Jungerman received the A.H. Heineken Prize for Art, the biggest visual art prize in the Netherlands. From November 20, 2021 – April 10, 2022 he was the subject of a career survey show at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam titled Remy Jungerman: Behind the Forest. In 2019, Jungerman represented the Netherlands at the 58th Venice Biennale with the impressive Visiting Deities installation. Later that year, the artist had his introduction exhibition Neap Tide at Galerie Ron Mandos. In 2017 he was nominated for the Black Achievement Award in The Netherlands. In 2008 he received the Fritschy Culture Award from the Museum het Domein, Sittard.