Ernie Barnes - The Disco [1978]

This work opens the door on a Harlem night or an Atlanta night or a Los Angeles night – places where the artist himself has spent time and seen living done the right way and sometimes the wrong way. Whether faces he knows or novel assemblages of features on faces he has encountered, Barnes’s club-goers are more than carefree neighbours enjoying a night on the town, they instead assume the honourable responsibility of standing in for all those characters so often overlooked, those lives lived in shadow, those existences expunged as quickly as they began.

 

[Christie’s, New York - Acrylic on canvas, 75.9 x 101 cm]

Done