Sirius #2

2022

Sirius #2, 2022. Ouattara Watts (American, b. 1957, Abidjan, Ivory Coast). Mixed media on canvas; 200 x 200 cm (78 3/4 x 78 3/4 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Agnes Gund in honor of Tanya Coke 2022.103 This large-scale work features core elements from a visual vocabulary that Ouattara Watts has been developing over the last four and a half decades: a West African mask floats in the center of a mathematical diagram whose arrows point upwards to the heavens and sideways to an evocation of Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s signature Endless Column. This painted iconography interacts with expressionist painterly gestures and collaged elements, such as the lace doily at the center of the composition. The Cleveland Museum of Art owns a Kanaga mask (1971.289) of the type that is rendered in Sirius #2.