Goya Contemporary | Charles Mason III: Whose Pain Do We Acknowledge First?
May 24 – August 6, 2021
Charles Mason III: Whose Pain Do We Acknowledge First?
Goya Contemporary
In-Person Viewing:
3000 Chestnut Avenue, Mill Centre #214, Baltimore, MD 21211
Baltimore- Goya Contemporary Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of artworks by Contemporary American artist Charles Mason III (B. 1990, Maryland), marking his first major exhibition with the gallery.
The Baltimore based artist and educator creates abstractions around identity politics and the “performative act of
blackness” experienced and manifested through physical materials. Capturing the pulse of the city, and the beat of
his own drum, Mason is “far more interested in creating spaces that allow for the audience’s own experiences of
engagement with black identity.”
Mason’s improvisational ‘sculpt-painting’ is a non-traditional style that explores layers of personal expression
through use of color, form, gesture, and texture, while remaining grounded in social realism. Mason’s work
focuses on individual experiences, as well as police brutality, loss, and the generational trauma experienced by
black Americans as a result of systemic racism. Mason seeks to reveal the essence of emotion and self-expression
through material accumulations. Working between media, fluidly moving from paint on canvas to works made
on, or of torn, printed, and impressed upon paper; Mason’s constructions are more about experimentation with
materials to achieve an emotional response than they are about constraining himself to a defined and limited
media.
The art historical narrative of American Abstraction has been told with an inordinately white cast of characters,
misrepresenting the authentic story of abstract practitioners. More recently, Black artists’ contributions to the
amplification of contemporary figuration have been acknowledged, almost to the point of erroneously
pigeonholing all POC’s into the category of figuration.
