“Nothing is more gall-bitter than suffering, nothing more honey-sweet than having suffered.” — Meister Eckhart
Devendra Banhart’s barbarous, nonlinear nomenclature is savage in its nonaggression, and completely at peace with its perverse audacity. The recursive abstracted forms within his canvases are a non-hierarchical alphabet of allegories for the diminishment and destruction of ego. Each mouth, prick, eye, and ass breaks apart and reconstructs itself until they become a collective commune of equally all-important, yet weightless pieces of the tantric universe. They are a cycle of mala beads through the fingers of time.
The Grief I Have Caused You, Banhart’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, is a survey of recent paintings and drawings mostly completed during a year when the Grand Pendulum neglected to swing back to “having suffered.” Though they were sowed in a moment of near-universal hurt, each composition manifests an equal, harmonic measure of joy: grotesque figurations of comedy and tragedy embrace and approach fellatio in “Nyima & Dawa,” 2021; a fat-bottomed, high-heeled hiker rejoices at a finally flat stretch of terrain while a behemoth of a feline looms menacingly overhead in “Twilight Hiker,” 2021; “Offering,” 2021, is a total deconstruction of the elements represented within the first two, a Buddhist garden partially digested by the biome of infinity. (Banhart’s flora includes the cubist and surrealist tendencies of Paul Klee, the expressionistic poetry of Helen Frankenthaler, and the violent gestures of Ethel Schwabacher, to name a few.)
If time is a circular property, then the human condition is a perennial state of suffering and having suffered, often and increasingly all at once. The Grief I Have Caused You is the artist’s rumination on the uniquely personal, yet absolute universality of this push-and-pull. His grief is your grief, but so is his ecstasy. Viewings can be reserved via the gallery’s website HERE.
Devendra Banhart (b. 1980, Houston, Texas) lives and works in Los Angeles. An internationally renowned musician considered a pioneer of the “freak folk” and “New Weird America” movements, Banhart has toured, performed, and collaborated with Vashti Bunyan, Yoko Ono, Os Mutantes, Swans, ANOHNI, Caetano Veloso, and Beck, amongst many others. His musical work has always existed symbiotically alongside his pursuits in the other fine arts. In addition to painting and drawing most of his own album covers (the album artwork for his 2010 album What Will We Be was nominated for a Grammy), he has contributed to Doug Aitken’s multimedia Station to Station project. He has performed at MoMA (New York), MoCA (Los Angeles), The Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), LACMA (Los Angeles), and The Broad Museum (Los Angeles). Exhibitions include Voglio proprio vedere, Mazzoli, Modena, Italy (2017); Sphinx Interiors & Other Works, Mazzoli, Modena, Italy (2014, solo); Abstract Rhythms: Paul Klee and Devendra Banhart, SFMoMA, San Francisco (2007–2008); Music is a Better Noise, MoMA PS1, Queens, New York (2007); and Devendra Banhart, Mazzoli, Modena, Italy (2006, solo). His monograph of drawings and paintings I Left My Noodle on Ramen Street (2015, Prestel) features essays by Jeffrey Deitch and Beck.
The Grief I Have Caused You is Banhart’s first solo exhibition with Nicodim, and his first in Los Angeles.
Devendra Banhart
° Born 1981, Houston, Texas
Lives and works in Los Angeles, California
Selected Exhibitions
2021 The Grief I Caused You, Nicodim, Los Angeles
2020 Human is a Five Letter Word, Galerie Droste, Wuppertal
2017 Voglio Proprio Vedere… Musica da guardare arte da ascoltare, Galleria Mazzoli, Modena, Italy 2014 Devendra Banhart: Sphinx Interiors & Other Works, Galleria Mazzoli, Modena, Italy (solo)
2011 Devendra Banhart, Keegan McHargue, and Adam Tullie: Strangers in the Night, Galleria Patricia Armocida, Milan, Italy
2010 The Artist’s Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
2008 It’s not only Rock ‘n’ Roll, Baby!, Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels Abstract Rhythms: Paul Klee and Devendra Banhart, SFMOMA, San Francisco
2007 Music is a Better Noise, MoMA PS1, Queens, New York
2006 Devendra Banhart, Galleria Mazzoli, Modena, Italy (solo) Uncertain States of America, curated by Gunnar B. Kvaran, Hans Ulbrich Obrist, and Daniel Birnbaum, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo Drawings and Paintings of Places and Things, Atelier Cardenas Bellanger, Paris Yo Miro Un Garza Mora dandole Combate a un Rio, curated by Devendra Banhart, Atelier Cardenas Bellanger, Paris
2004 Devendra Banhart Drawings, Andrew Roth Gallery, New York (solo) Yesteryear, CANADA, New York California Earthquakes, Daniel Reich Gallery, New York Majority Whip, White Box, New York
2003 You Are My Sunshine, You Is My Sunshine, CANADA, New York Institutional
Performances
2020 The Broad, Los Angeles
2019 Hauser and Wirth, Los Angeles
2017 The Broad, Los Angeles
2015 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
2011 The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
2010 Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA)
2007 Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA)
Albums
2019 Ma
2016 Ape in Pink Marble
2013 Mala
2009 What Will We Be
2007 Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon 2005 Cripple Crow
2004 Rejoicing in the Hands
2004 Niño Rojo
2002 The Charles C. Leary
2002 Oh Me Oh My
Publications
2019 Vanishing Wave (Anteism)
Weeping Gang Bliss Void Yab-Yum (Featherproof)
2015 I Left My Noodle on Ramen Street (Prestel) Unburdened By Meaning: Adam Tullie & Devendra Banhart (Anteism)
