Louis Buhl & Co. is delighted to announce our participation in Expo Chicago 2024 with a two-person exhibition featuring Detroit-based artists Davariz Broaden and Olivia Guterson. The artists’ work, though vastly different in their styles and visual qualities, are alike in their common mining of familial narratives and roots in nostalgia. Further, Broaden and Guterson are the first to join the Louis Buhl & Co.’s roster of represented artists in 2023.
Commonly using a muted color palette, Broaden’s paintings distill a soft essence and highlight the importance of love and beauty within the Black community, as well as sentimental events in the Black experience. Broaden’s flourishing craft pursues the rich tradition of figurative painting, while the warm energy exuded throughout his work manifests itself onto the viewer with ease. To conjure his figures, Broaden looks to his friends, family, and the many memories of time spent together, promoting the idea that the people around us are what makes life worth living.
Guterson’s abstract multimedia paintings are similarly driven by remembrance and ancestral patterns. The iconographies and geometric abstractions that make up her constellation of works are informed by mementos or memories Guterson recalls, such as fabrics her grandmother sewed and quilted and that great grandmother would wear, or the spices her grandmother on her mother’s side would use to cook with growing up. Distilling these influences to simple, digestible shapes forges endless and harmonious patterns that tell a story very specific to the artist, although allot space for the viewer to draw their own associations based on personal experience.
Paintings
Davariz Broaden
A Song for the Sun #2, 2024
Oil, acrylic and sugar on canvas
60 in diameter
Olivia Guterson
Unravel, 2024
Oil, acrylic, steel wire, cotton thread, wood, African fish bone, African coconut, sawdust, glass seed beads, pumice, sand, cornstarch and glitter on cotton canvas
84h x 48w in
Davariz Broaden
A Song for the Sun #3, 2024
Oil, acrylic and sugar on canvas
72 x 54 in
Olivia Guterson
Until The Sun Falls, 2024
Oil, acrylic, steel wire, cotton thread, wood, African fish bone, African coconut, sawdust, glass seed beads, pumice, sand, cornstarch and glitter on cotton canvas
48 inch diameter
Davariz Broaden
A Song for the Sun #1, 2024
Oil, acrylic and sugar on canvas
48h x 48w in
Olivia Guterson
And The Darkness She Called Night, 2024
Oil, acrylic, steel wire, cotton thread, wood, African fish bone, African coconut, sawdust, glass seed beads, pumice, sand, cornstarch, breath, and glitter on cotton canvas
60 inch diameter