Opening: Masquerade

September 19, 2026 - June 06, 2027
From the Ostillo Foundation:
"The Ostillo Foundation’s inaugural exhibition, “Masquerade", brings together work from some of the leading figures in the world of contemporary art. Comprising works dating from the 1970s to the present day – some of which are being exhibited in the United States for the first time – the exhibition brings together radically different forms. Whether conveyed through paintings, weavings, sculptures or photographs, the figures on display in “Masquerade" are smiling, grimacing, confrontational, allusive, dark, multicoloured, whole or incomplete. This combination speaks to a culture of entertainment as much as other quotidian, ritualized or enigmatic practices. The complex relationships between make-up and painting, identities and appearances, faces and masks, are unravelled and renegotiated in this exhibition, which speaks more to resonance than direct connections.
Within this panorama, Ostillo has also made space for abstraction, notably via Glenn Ligon’s painting whose name the exhibition has borrowed. The artist uses quotations from 'Stranger in the Village', an article by James Baldwin that first appeared in Harper's Magazine in the fall of 1953. In it, the writer recounts his stay in an isolated village in Switzerland. He was the only African-American there, and the villagers regarded him as an "attraction" and a "curiosity", "thinking that [his] hair was the colour of tar". Baldwin revisits the blackface practices that were once popular in his native America, encountering the blackened faces of village children dressed up for carnival. In Masquerade, Ligon renders his words illegible by leaving large gaps in the silkscreen. The letters, now camouflaged, constitute a dense material similar to petrol. Embedded in the thickness of the canvas, the words are erased: disguised."
© Sanya Kantarovsky, Nervous Man, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Modern Art, VeneKlasen and Gisela Capitain.
Reception September 19, 2026 | 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Ostillo Art Foundation
2600 Rosewood Avenue
Austin, Texas 78702