Melvin Edwards | Palais de Tokyo | 22 October 2025 – 15 February 2026
How to inject violence, the visceral, musicality and rhythm into the cold, modernist aesthetic of formalist abstraction? In their title and materiality, Melvin Edwards’s ‘Lynch Fragments’ (1963–2016) – small assemblages of welded metal objects and industrial materials, including spikes, chains and scissors – suggest the charge of history and the pain inflicted on non-white bodies, simultaneously evoking memories of slavery and police brutality. Equally mesmerizing are Edwards’s barbed-wire sculptures – tender and threatening all at once, imperceptible until it’s almost too late – and the pieces made in homage to, or in collaboration with, his late wife, the poet and performer Jayne Cortez. His resolute, quiet works cast a critical eye on cultural and socio-economic realities, specifically in the US, as well as the lacunae of its historical memory.
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