Remy Jungerman’s new solo exhibition “BLUE OBIA” opens at Fridman Gallery on Friday, September 12, 2025, from 5:00 to 7:00pm. It will remain on view through October 12, 2025. Fridman Gallery is located at 169 Bowery, New York, New York. It is open Wednesdays through Sundays, from 11:00am to 6:00pm, and by appointment. The gallery team explains, “Marking a significant moment in Jungerman’s development as an artist, BLUE OBIA is a space of convergence where geometry meets spirit and repetition becomes ritual.”
Description: Fridman Gallery is proud to present BLUE OBIA, a solo exhibition by artist Remy Jungerman featuring a new body of work that deepens Jungerman’s long-standing engagement with the visual and spiritual ties between Surinamese Maroon culture, West Africa, and 20th century Modernism.
Employing his signature materials cotton textile, kaolin clay (pimba), and wood—materials deeply rooted in the Afro-Surinamese religion Winti—the panels, cubes, and free-standing sculptures in this exhibition feature richly layered yet minimalist compositions. Invoking the African diasporic practice of Obia (or Obeah or Obiya)—a term associated with healing, protection, and ancestral guidance—this new body of work reflects on the power of ritual to connect the seen and the unseen, the past and the present.
In a new series of panels titled Pimba BAAU, the color blue becomes a central force. BAAU means blue in the Saramaccan language, the language of the Saamaka, one of the seven Maroon communities in Suriname. Referencing the Surinamese practice of applying a dab of Reckitt’s bluing tablets, a laundry product, behind babies’ ears to protect them from evil influences, in this series Jungerman begins with a blue base from which he builds a grid consisting of pencil lines, textile and kaolin clay. A large panel titled Three Rivers II consisting of a grid upon which Jungerman “maps” his ongoing project to merge water from the three rivers that connect his life and work—the Cotitca in Moengo, Suriname, the Amstel in Amsterdam, and the Hudson River in New York. Three Rivers II invites a broader reflection on the historical connections between New York, the Netherlands, and Suriname that resulted from the transatlantic slave trade and the massive impact this great movement of people and art-making traditions has had on the history of art.
Marking a significant moment in Jungerman’s development as an artist, BLUE OBIA is a space of convergence where geometry meets spirit and repetition becomes ritual.
𝗥𝗲𝗺𝘆 𝗝𝘂𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻 (b. 1959) lives and works in New York and Amsterdam. He studied at the Academy for Higher Arts and Cultural Education in Paramaribo, Suriname, and later at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. His work is held in major public and private collections, including the Stedelijk Museum, International African American Museum in Charleston, SC, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Centraal Museum, Tropenmuseum, and the Rennie Collection, among others.
For more information, see https://fridmangallery.com/
[Shown above: Remy Jungerman’s 1) Pimba SEMOISI II, detail; and 2) Three Rivers II, detail.]
@fridmangallery
Remy Jungerman’s new solo exhibition “BLUE OBIA” opens at Fridman Gallery on Friday, September 12, 2025, from 5:00 to 7:00pm. It will remain on view through October 12, 2025. Fridman Gallery is located at 169 Bowery, New York, New York. It is open Wednesdays through Sundays, from 11:00am to 6:00pm, and by appointment. The gallery team explains,
