Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery is pleased to present the new solo exhibition of Yashua Klos titled Towards A New Mythology.
In this new body of work, Klos expands his exploration of dimensional portrait busts intersected by grids and construction materials.  These planes now also hold reference to Art Deco motifs mounted on municipal buildings in Klos’s hometown Chicago. He fractures and breaks these motifs with amalgamated representations of his friends and family who work in city maintenance and construction. Klos chooses to subvert this use of Art Deco, away from its function as municipal power symbol, and towards a reclamation of space for the people of color who constitute the actual laboring population of large American cities.
While Art Deco design deployed across American cities often borrows imagery and narrative from ancient Greece and Rome, Klos’s portraits become entangled with those histories, making space for new narratives.
Towards A New Mythology also features “sidewalk” collages that depict text and imagery etched into concrete pavement. In Klos’s work, the sidewalk connects the open, communal nature of pedestrian space with the visually democratic structure of the grid, inviting viewers to enter the composition from any point. Like the grid itself, the sidewalk is accessible to all—any passerby can inscribe a lasting mark in its surface. Such acts become both gestures of defiance and enduring traces of individual existence in the face of an uncertain future. The geometric forms in Who’s Streets? Our Streets (2026) evoke the monumental pyramids of Giza, while its title immortalizes a call-and-response chant heard during the 2020 protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, transforming a protest chant into a permanent assertion of collective presence, dignity, and the right to public space.

Biography

Yashua Klos (born 1977, Chicago, Illinois) received his BFA from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb (2000) and his MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York (2009). Recent exhibitions featuring Klos’s work include Ancestral: Afro-Americas at the Museum of Brazilian Art FAAP (2024); the traveling survey Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary Collage, organized by and presented at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Tennessee (2023), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas (2024), and the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2024); and Elegies: Still Lifes in Contemporary Art at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, California (2022). The artist’s first major institutional exhibition, Yashua Klos: OUR LABOUR, curated by Tracy Adler, was presented at the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Clinton, New York, in 2022.
Klos’s work is included in the public collections of the Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, Georgia; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York. He has been awarded residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans (2022); the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont (2014); and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, Nebraska (2012). Klos is the recipient of a 2015 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship and a 2014 Joan Mitchell Foundation grant. He lives in Queens and works in Brooklyn, New York.