Artists

Dominic Chambers

Press release

When the sprites of ideas enter the studio and marry themselves to resolve of the artist committed to fully realizing them, one enters the summoning world—a state of creative immersion, that inner greenfield home to those things that shimmer: ideas, memory, dreams, and bodies without form or language, and perhaps angels live there too.
—Dominic Chambers

Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce Meraki, an exhibition of new work by American artist Dominic Chambers, opening October 8th in the gallery’s permanent space at Cromwell Place in London’s South Kensington neighborhood. Marking the artist’s first solo presentation in the United Kingdom, Meraki spans two floors and includes expansive paintings, brightly colored studies, and several works on paper. Chambers, born in St. Louis, MO and currently based in New Haven, CT, is best known for his vivid, colorful paintings that frequently depict scenes of leisure and contemplation as a mode for exploring ideas of personal interiority. In this exhibition, the artist expands his lens to the realm of devotion, engaging themes of inspired connection to work, art, and the natural world. The opening of Meraki coincides with London’s Frieze week; a reception will be held on October 8th with the artist in attendance. Elsewhere in Europe, Chambers’ work is included in the group exhibition When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting at the Kunstmusuem Basel, on view through October 27th.  

In creating his latest body of work, Chambers took the idea of meraki, a Greek word meaning “to pour one's soul into one's work,” as an origin point. As the title of the exhibition, Chambers uses this concept as a frame of inquiry, contemplating what it might mean to pour oneself into a creative endeavor and how the concept of the soul, or one’s own interiority, can intersect with ideas of devotion. These themes are poetically illustrated in The Summoning World (Studio Angel) (2024), a large-scale painting that blends the artist’s studio with a serene landscape, populated by a single, reclining angel. Chambers identifies this angel as Gabriel, of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, referencing the long tradition of angels functioning as messengers. Often acting as divine intermediaries bearing important news or a spark of inspiration, the figure of the angel has appeared for centuries across religious texts, literature, and art history—from the work of Leonardo Da Vinci to that of Kerry James Marshall. While Chambers’ warm, yellow-orange tones in The Summoning World (Studio Angel) suggest the golden settings of Fra Angelico, the scene, which is hung with artworks in various states of completion, also recalls Henri Matisse’s The Red Studio (1911). Astute viewers will note that some of the paintings depicted can be found hanging in the gallery exhibition. Here, Chambers places the painter in the role of the summoner, bringing images and objects into the material world from another realm.