Over the past ten years, the American artist Jeff Sonhouse has created a powerful body of portrait paintings depicting often-masked black male figures that consistently defy and obscure classification. Sonhouse uses masking to reveal as well as to conceal issues of identity in our culture. The matches, smoke and burned areas seem to hint at the incendiary nature of race relations in America. Sonhouse’s paintings include references as varied as traditional African masks, art historical figures as Romare Bearden, Charles White or Pablo Picasso.
Sonhouse’s subject is the African American male within Western culture, employing a visual language he has developed over the years. Repeated and edited over time, these characters have become his own. Sonhouse’s figures are presented frontally, painted close up to appear right on the canvas surface and indeed, are frequently built up with collage elements to extend into the viewer’s space. The paintings are both beautiful and provocative. Sonhouse’s distinctive painting vocabulary includes the use of cut and collaged magazine images, carefully patterned and collaged matchsticks, steel wool and soldered metal, set against his carefully rendered painted illusions. His trademark harlequin pattern, superimposed upon the faces of his subjects, immediately makes the viewer aware that, although realistically painted, these are symbolic images. By drawing upon specific and overtly violent and sexual imagery prevalent in our culture, and by pushing his figures’ symbolism to the extreme, Sonhouse exposes the hypocrisy and absurdity inherent within the myths that surround the African American male.

Jeff Sonhouse (B.1968, New York, NY) received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 1998 and his MFA from Hunter College, New York in 2001. He won the Joan Mitchell Foundation awards and the New York Foundation for the Art prize both in 2004. His work has been included in exhibitions such as Frequency and The Bearden Project, at The Studio Museum in Harlem in 2005 and 2012 respectively; 30 Americans, at the Rubell Family Collection, Miami in 2009 which traveled widely throughout museums across America through 2016; and Face to Face: Los Angeles Collects Portraiture, at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles in 2017. Solo museum exhibitions include Probable Cause at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in 2003, and Opener 26 Jeff Sonhouse: Slow Motion at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs in 2014. His work is part of public collections including Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; Artist Pension Trust, New York; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; and The Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH ; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MI ; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL ; Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI. Jeff Sonhouse’s last solo exhibition was at Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery in Luxembourg in September 2021. He is a recipient of the 2022 Colene Brown Art Prize. In 2024, Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery will edit the first monograph of the artist: “Jeff Sonhouse: Masks, Fire, and Fortitude”, with written essays by Belinda A. Tate and Erin Dziedzic.