‘Bits, Boobs and Bullets’: Donald Locke and Anderson Borba
Oliver Basciano, Art Review
September 2025
Blackness, nothingness, the void: this is the ur-state of every origin story from Genesis to the Big Bang. Three black paintings hung side-by-side open Donald Locke’s retrospective, and depending on your mood or point of view, these are either funereal or mark a moment of life’s inception. Barracoon I (1978) is a monochrome onto which the late Guyanese artist tacked 53 canvas squares, likewise painted black, shaped to represent the entrance of a tunnel. This sense of a Malevichian abyss continues in 63 Black Squares (1978–79), a patchwork grid of black canvas squares, and more grimly in The Cage (1976–79), another black patchwork grid, this time the canvas interrupted by cagelike metal grilles, painted black, which frame a square of black fur stitched behind it. From Locke’s use of black, which continued throughout his 50-year career, form emerges: the retrospective quickly establishes the artist’s work beyond the canvas through a series of biomorphic pots, spanning the 1960s to the 1980s, collected on a multilevel stage. Bodily bits, boobs and bottoms bulge forth, smoothly rounded into near abstraction; their blackness reflective, their obvious tactility seductive, the shininess of the black glaze giving the barely practical receptacles a fetishistic feel. […]