Raymond Saunders: Post No Bills

Discover Raymond Saunders's dynamic paintings and his extraordinary legacy as an artist and thinker in this first ever monograph. Saunders’s work brings together his extensive formal training with his own observations and lived experience. His assemblage-style paintings frequently begin with a monochromatic black ground elaborated with white chalk—a pointed reversal of the traditional figure-ground relationship. He subsequently adds a range of other markings, materials, and talismans—from wallpaper to advertisements, rulers to paintbrushes. Expressionistic swaths of paint, minimalist motifs, line drawings, and passages of vibrant color tangle with found objects, signs, and doors collected from his urban environment at home and abroad, creating unexpected visual rhymes and resonances that reward careful and sustained looking. At once deliberately constructed and improvisatory, didactic and deeply felt, these richly built surfaces conjure a range of themes, allowing for a vast and nuanced multiplicity of meanings. Hardcover, 208 pages.