Torkwase Dyson works primarily with the color black in an abstract style, often combining delicate brushwork with textural effects to produce complex and nuanced surfaces. Bird and Lava #04 belongs to a series that explores bird flight and lava flows as metaphors for Black liberation. Like Zao Wou-ki and Franz Kline, also on view in this gallery, Dyson is interested in reducing abstraction to a monochrome black palette, yet she insists on the social meanings that abstract forms can contain. The circular shape of the canvas, often referred to as a tondo, was popular during the Italian Renaissance. Dyson repeatedly adopts this shape, which echoes a portal or tunnel, in works that allude to systems of Black oppression and pathways to freedom.

05.26.26

Hirshhorn Museum
Washington, DC