





prodigal
2023
Woven in cotton and acrylic yarn across a field of nearly equal height and width, "prodigal" presents Diedrick Brackens's signature interweaving of narrative, body, and textile history at an intimate yet commanding scale. Completed in 2023, the work continues Brackens's sustained engagement with the handloom as a site of storytelling, drawing on sources as varied as West African weaving traditions, Biblical parable, and the lived textures of Black queer identity. The title invokes the parable of the prodigal son, a story of departure, wandering, and conditional return, and Brackens routes that archetypal tension through a visual language of interlocking figures and chromatic passages that resist tidy resolution. At roughly 256 by 251 centimeters, the work commands the wall without overwhelming it, its near-square proportion lending a meditative stillness to what is, on closer inspection, a charged and complex surface. Brackens constructs meaning through the loom itself, treating warp and weft as vocabulary, so that color relationships, density of thread, and the physical presence of yarn carry emotional weight that representational imagery alone could not. The result is a textile that functions simultaneously as painting, as object, and as encoded language. Signed and offered through Jack Shainman Gallery, "prodigal" represents Brackens at a mature and confident point in his practice, when the personal, the political, and the formal have become genuinely inseparable. For collectors seeking work that rewards sustained attention and holds its resonance across years, this is a rare opportunity to acquire a significant example from one of the most discussed weavers working today.
- Medium
- Cotton and acrylic yarn
- Overall
- Signed
- Yes
- Location
- Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, NY
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