Winfred Rembert. Hard Times is the first Los Angeles exhibition devoted to late American artist Winfred Rembert (1945 – 2021) at Hauser & Wirth’s Downtown Arts District complex. The show includes paintings from two of the artist’s most recognizable bodies of work—the Cotton Field and Chain Gang collections in his signature medium of carved and painted leather. The works reflect his upbringing on a sharecropping field in Georgia in the 1950s and his labor on a prison chain gang in the 1960s and ‘70s. At once figural and abstract, painted and sculptural, Rembert’s compositions feature varying palettes, ranging from the natural tones of the leather and the graphic use of black and white to the incorporation of vibrant blocks of color. 

The exhibition runs until August 25th. 

Winfred Rembert’s work is represented in the permanent collections of Blanton Museum of Art, Austin TX; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland OH; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville AR; Flint Institute of the Arts, Flint MI; Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme CT; Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens GA; Glenstone, Potomac MD; High Museum of Art, Atlanta GA; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH; Legacy Museum, Equal Justice Initiative, Montgomery AL; Hudson River Museum, Yonkers NY; Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles CA; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee WI; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis MN; Muskegon Museum of Art, Youngstown OH; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Richard M. Ross Museum of Art, Wesleyan University, Delaware OH; Speed Art Museum, Louisville KY; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford CT; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven CT. Rembert’s work was highlighted in major exhibitions at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery AL in 2013; the Flint Institute of the Arts, Flint MI in 2013; the Citadelle Art Foundation, Canadian, Texas in 2012; the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers NY in 2012; and the Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville SC in 2012.