Image 002-17.jpg
Image 002-03.jpg
Image 002-15.jpg
Image 002-14.jpg
Image 002-10.jpg
Image 002-13.jpg
Image 002-16.jpg
Image 002-02.jpg
Image 002-11.jpg
Image 002-12.jpg
Image 002-09.jpg
Image 002-07.jpg
Image 002-08.jpg
Image 002-04.jpg
Image 002-05.jpg
Image 002-06.jpg

“cheekbones of the mask only”

Tala, Riga Contemporary, Riga, Latvia

July 2 - 5, 2026

Tala is proud to present a new series of works by London-based, Liberian-American artist Roland Knowlden Jr. for Riga Contemporary 2026.

Working across sculpture and painting, Knowlden Jr. examines the material poetics of the “entryway,” using the visual language of the West African mask as a conceptual point of departure alongside his conceptual abstract paintings.

In sculptures such as not memory but the lack thereof, Knowlden turns the decorative face of a mask towards its smooth, inner concave, foregrounding its interior void. In doing so, he universalizes its unmarked surface and emphasizes the mask’s reverse side as an allusion ritual entry, suggesting the individual’s active role in engaging with the mask’s sonic and spiritual dimensions, while resisting its aestheticization as an object within Western art canon. Alongside these sculptures, a linear arrangement of two or three paintings are be featured within the booth. Extending the mask’s exploration into abstract, spiritual realms, Knowlden Jr.’s paintings navigate the visual language of chaos as a modality of opacity - in part drawing on Édouard Glissant’s contentions with reductive containment and on Jack Whitten’s use of layering to create infinite depths. To him, abstraction is equal parts destruction and reconstruction, a process he likens to the combustion of a flame’s inferno. Here, fire is a conceptually rich premise within which systemic oppression has been historically dissected (as foregrounded by James Balwdwin’s seminal text The Fire Next Time) - Knowlden Jr. echoes this lineage while expanding the horizons of his practice towards new conventions of conceptual abstraction.