Image: MASSIMODECARLO, Milan
The selection includes ‘Berkeley: Suite 8’ (2018), ‘Sixteen: Square: 1’ (2021), ‘Berkeley: Suite 6’ (2018), and ‘Sixteen: Square: 2’ (2021). MASSIMODECARLO is presenting a focused selection of prints by Chicago-based artist McArthur Binion, with works spanning the years 2017 to 2022.
Across aquatint and etching, these works bring together the strict order of the grid with fragments of imagery drawn from Binion’s own life, including photographs, documents, places and memories that surface gradually through layers of colour, pattern and repetition. For Binion, the grid is a form of ‘handmade geometry’: a disciplined structure that allows images and information to be repeated, concealed and revealed.
The ‘Berkeley: Suite’ works develop this language through layered combinations of a 1970s self-portrait, a photograph of Binion’s childhood home, pages from his address book and copies of his Mississippi birth certificate.
McArthur Binion was born in 1946 in Macon, Georgia, and lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. Since the 1970s, he has sought an alternative to minimalist art through a personal philosophy of pictorial grids fused with archival belongings, such as pages from his phone books, personal family photographs and found documents from the history of the Afro-American community.
The artist’s distinctive insertion of narrative and personal history, together with his emphasis on content, differentiates his work from a more traditional minimalist practice.
