Dominic Chambers: Meraki
Lehmann Maupin, London
October 8 – November 9, 2024
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 presents Meraki, an exhibition of new work by American artist Dominic Chambers, 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. Dominic 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.
In creating his latest body of work, Dominic 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, Dominic 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 Dominic 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 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.
Dominic Chambers also looks to the natural world as a space of devotion and replenishment. In his new Thunderscape (2024) series, the artist depicts minute figures amidst landscapes of rolling hills and colossal trees, with each canvas drenched in rich, vibrant color. These works in particular reveal the influence of Magical Realism in Chambers’ practice—in naming the series, he envisioned a surreal vista, where the shadows from tree branches became lightning bolts. In this world, the electrified landscape comes alive with sound, creating the titular thunderscape.
Dominic Chambers’ Thunderscapes also feature flying kites, some tethered, others autonomous, racing through the skies. These kites recall those in the paintings in his exhibition Leave Room for the Wind, which opened at Lehmann Maupin New York in early 2024. Their presence in the Thunderscapes series suggests they have escaped those picture planes to enter new canvases; they function as avatars, for either the artist or the creative spirit, time traveling across exhibitions and bodies of work.
Throughout Meraki, Dominic Chambers expands his explorations of leisure and interiority begun in earlier exhibitions—from the mental and physical leisure seen in Soft Shadows (2022) to the kinetic leisure in Leave Room for the Wind. In Meraki, he finds a new site for the replenishment of personal interiority in devotion, considering the spiritual as well as the bodily and intellectual, painting beyond the figurative and capturing the psyche.
LEHMANN MAUPIN LONDON
1 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, SW7 2JE London
