Leila Heller is pleased to announce Style and Sympathies, an exhibition of photographs by Nigerian-born New Yorker Iké Udé, on view at Leila Heller Gallery, located at 568 West 25th Street, from October 10th to November 9th.
Style and Sympathies includes a selection of self-portraits from Udé’s critically acclaimed Sartorial Anarchy series and, for the first time, the series will be broadly continued and presented. Udé’s distinctive portraits, which poeticize colors, sumptuous fabrics, and composition, transcend the traditional aesthetic of portraiture by adopting a post-modern twist. The portraits show a highly stylized world of color and improvisational virtuosity, in which the artist employs men’s fashion ensembles that have been culled from various historical times and geographies.
At once a reference to and departure from Dandyism, Udé’s Sartorial Anarchy series is essentially post-dandyism in its conceptual use of fashion/costume as an index of culture. Udé has been engaged with this body of work since 2010, when the first photographs of this series were presented in the exhibition, The Global Africa Project, at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), New York. Most recently, Udé has continued his Sartorial Anarchy series for the exhibition Artist/Rebel/Dandy: Men of Fashion at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum.
On view in the Gallery’s back room will be a selection of commissioned works by Udé, featuring portraits of such luminaries as Amy Fine Collins, Harold Koda, and Manolo Blahnik.