Announcing the Representation of Raymond Saunders

In his works, Saunders brings together his extensive formal training with his own observations and lived experience. His assemblage-style paintings frequently begin with a monochromatic black ground elaborated with white chalk—both a pointed reversal of the traditional figure-ground relationship and a nod to Saunders’s decades spent as a teacher. He subsequently adds a range of other markings, materials, and talismans. Expressionistic swaths of paint, minimalist motifs, line drawings, and passages of vibrant color tangle with found objects, signs, and doors collected from his urban environment, creating unexpected visual rhymes and resonances that reward careful and sustained looking. At once deliberately constructed and improvisatory, didactic and deeply felt, these richly built surfaces conjure the fullness of life, and its complications, allowing for a vast and nuanced multiplicity of meanings. 

Saunders’s singular aesthetic finds echoes in the work of artists ranging from Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg to Joseph Beuys and Jean-Michel Basquiat, but remains unmistakably his own. As curator Connie H. Choi of The Studio Museum in Harlem describes, “Sights and sounds pass by as one moves along a city street, encountering the world, making decisions, and changing one’s mind as one goes. Such is the beauty of Saunders’s paintings. They are about life and all of its battles and victories, dirtiness and splendor.”