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2023
Freeing My Peoples (Featuring Chito) announces itself with the force of an altar and a street corner compressed into a single, towering presence. Measuring over three meters tall, this 2023 work by Aaron Fowler fuses oil and acrylic paint, paint markers, charcoal, and resin with car parts, tires, and nails embedded directly into the wooden support, while LED neon casts its signature glow across collaged imagery that pulses with biographical and communal weight. The result is a surface that refuses passivity, layering the handmade against the industrial, the sacred against the everyday, to produce something that feels simultaneously monument and memoir. Fowler has built his practice around autobiographical narrative and the lives of people close to him, and this work, which names its subject in the title, extends that commitment to portraiture as an act of liberation. The word "freeing" is not incidental. It carries spiritual, emotional, and political resonance, situating the figure of Chito within a visual language that draws on Black American vernacular culture, church iconography, and the material textures of the neighborhoods Fowler grew up in. Car parts and tires are not decorative flourishes here but load-bearing elements, objects that carry the history of labor, mobility, and survival within communities whose stories are too rarely treated as worthy of monumental scale. Available through Gallery Common, this work represents Fowler at a mature and confident moment in his evolving practice. Collectors acquiring his work now are securing a piece of contemporary art history in the making, as institutional attention surrounding Fowler continues to grow and his large-scale mixed-media paintings claim their place among the most significant figurative works being produced today.
- Medium
- Oil and acrylic paint, paint markers, car parts, tires, nails, charcoal, resin, collaged images, wood panels, LED neon
- Overall
- Location
- Gallery Common, Tokyo
- Spotted At
- Gallery · Gallery CommonView on map
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