Mariane Ibrahim is honored to present Lorraine O’Grady, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Paris and her second with the gallery. This special presentation, the first since O'Grady's passing in December 2024, aims to celebrate the artist's extraordinary legacy. Featuring work spanning four decades (1981-2021), the exhibition examines O’Grady’s revolutionary conceptual practice and the critical yet nuanced ways in which she engaged tensions around race, gender, and colonialism. Guided by the rebellious and powerful nature of the iconic personas the artist created during her career–from her earliest, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, to her most recent, the Knight–the exhibition explores four distinct periods within O’Grady’s oeuvre, in which performance consistently played a central role and a unifying vision.
At the heart of the exhibition is Rivers, First Draft (1982), a performance-based artwork staged only once in New York City’s Central Park at The Loch as part of the Art Across the Park project. Conceived as a “collage-in-space,” the performance unfolded in three parts simultaneously across adjacent locations, weaving together Caribbean and New England heritages through distinct phases of the self: a young girl, a teenager, and an adult woman. O’Grady described the piece as “a three-ring circus of movement and sound that, unlike the randomness of Futurists attempting to shout each other down, played more like a unitary dream.” The performance, partly biographical, traces in broad strokes O’Grady’s evolution from child to artist, navigating dual structures of racism and sexism as it conceptually moves between the West Indies and New England.
Throughout her career O'Grady challenged the fragmentation of identity and history, advocating instead for an anti-hierarchical approach to difference that followed the reasoning of what she referred to as “Both/And”—an approach that allows for the coexistence and value of multiple perspectives or identities at the same time, rather than forcing them into opposing or conflicting categories.
This anti-hierarchical approach emerged from O’Grady’s deep engagement with French surrealism and literature. Having taught courses on Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism and Surrealist Literature focused on the work of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud at the School of the Visual Arts for twenty years, she consistently drew inspiration from these movements. “Intellectually, the most solid and long-lasting inspirations have been the works of F. T. Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, and André Breton. And Duchamp, of course, who subsumed them all. I do feel that Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism, though encapsulated in art history, are movements the 20th century hasn’t come to grips with. And they are still conductive. (…) I like those old guys for their warrior spirit.”
Surrealism was more than just a reference for O’Grady; it permeated both her intellectual framework and the very structure of her artistic practice. She described her predominant aesthetic as one of collision, in which disparate realities meet and generate new meaning, where multiple perspectives coexist: “… with me, the collage aesthetic reflects a desire to unify and contain everything. It is not intended to be merely descriptive; it is never a capitulation to fragmentation and division.” This notion of collision is central to O’Grady’s use of persona. Like several European surrealists—including Max Ernst, the feminist and gender-fluid Claude Cahun, and later Marcel Duchamp—who experimented with self-invention, theatricality, and disguise to challenge identity, gender roles, and reality itself, O’Grady employed performance as a method of transformation. Yet, for her, speaking through insubmissive characters who saw through society’s flaws and the hypocrisies of the art world was never intended to obscure or replace her own voice. Instead, her personas sharpened her critique, making her intentions clearer and more compelling. Initially performing through these characters, O’Grady subsequently documented, analyzed, and continually re-contextualized each persona, continuously confronting an ever-evolving cultural landscape.
At a turning point in her career, O’Grady moved away from live performance due to a convergence of both physical and economic factors. Harnessing her exceptional writing skills, she embraced a new approach that she would later call “writing in space”--transforming the live persona, once enacted through her own body, into characters who inhabited carefully structured narrative installations composed of diptychs (her most critical conceptual form). The resulting works are not mere documentations of past performances, but autonomous new artworks based on narrations that meticulously outline and organize into chapters or episodes within the gallery. O’Grady’s “writing in space” redefines performance itself, as it is simultaneous with its material form: the performance occurs not only as a past event, but actively within the artwork’s physical presence in the gallery.
In the series, Body is the Ground of My Experience often referred to as BodyGround, O’Grady produced five photomontages for her first solo exhibition of wall work at INTAR Gallery in New York, in 1991, curated by Judith Wilson. BodyGround encapsulates this move from the use of her own body and incorporates the central ideas shaping O’Grady’s artistic and theoretical concerns at the time. She sought to push beyond the oversimplifications of Postmodernism that she felt detached subjectivity from the body and repositioned it within history in ways that ultimately reinforced existing power structures. In contrast, O’Grady saw the body not only as a site where history inscribed itself, but also as a powerful site of resistance. In The Clearing: or Cortés and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me (diptych) (1991), O’Grady presents a diptych that confronts the racial and colonial tensions embedded in Western histories. The work visualizes both ecstasy and exploitation within a foundational yet under-theorized dynamic of the Western Hemisphere. The left panel portrays an interracial couple floating euphorically above a lush landscape, while below them, two mixed-race children innocently play beside an abandoned pile of clothing, nearby which rests a gun, quietly ominous. In stark contrast, the right panel presents a skeletal male figure in tattered chainmail grasping the breast of an aloof passive woman—suggesting that the romanticized ideals of medieval courtly love met their demise through conquest, exploitation, and enslavement. These analogue photomontages, created just before the advent of digital editing software such as Photoshop, deliberately departed from both the layered beauty of her earlier performance works and the detached formalism characteristic of postmodern photography. Instead, these pieces embrace a psychological literalness reminiscent of Surrealism, foregrounding the tensions and contradictions within identity and historical representation.
By presenting elements of four iconic bodies of works by Lorraine O’Grady–Rivers, First Draft, Body is the Ground of My Experience, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, and the Knight, this exhibition offers an intellectual invitation to delve deeper into the conceptual practice of one of the most groundbreaking artists of the last five decades.
