Nicola Vassell is pleased to present Untitled Transmutations, a solo presentation of new paintings by the artist Deborah Anzinger, at Frieze London. This series is comprised of works on paper rendered with ground cookshop charcoal—an essential but undervalued fuel indigenous to the artist’s native Jamaica—which she reconfigures from a natural resource for local survival into an aesthetic material for international consumption. Through this metamorphosis, Anzinger asks whether artwork can be catalyzed to serve the community rather than the consumer by shifting language from the capitalist to the ontological and the imperialist to the ecological, exposing the fragile paradoxes from which material culture is conceived and valued.
"Deborah Anzinger’s bold paintings and sculpture are saturated with metaphor and questioning. Deborah is an autodidact who began her career studying protocarnivorous plants and ultimately completed a Phd focused on HIV neuropathogenisis. She is an artist who operates in a global south style, assuming roles as community organizer and organization builder. She is the founder of New Local Space, Kingston, Jamaica. She makes practical and theoretical connections with the work of Erna Brodber, Gaama Gloria “Mama G” Simms, and Sylvia Wynter, helping make a Caribbean theoretical history and epistemology more visible. I cannot think of a more important artist right now."
— Simone Leigh
