Tahir Karmali, Frieze New York 2025, Installation View

For Frieze New York 2025, Management is pleased to present a solo booth of new works by Tahir Karmali.

Karmali is a Kenyan-born artist whose expansive material-oriented practice concentrates conceptually on migration, landscape/geology, labor, and belonging. For Frieze, Karmali expands his recent body of work presented first at Management in September 2024, followed by a commission for the Dakar Biennale of African Art in Senegal in November 2024. Referencing images of St. Sebastian, Karmali links sacrifice and devotion to defining notions of home and work. Faded behind skin tone mesh screens, Karmali depicts stressed, abstracted bodies painted in gypsum and gesso. Suspended from the painted surface by metal joists, the translucent layer masks a palette of materials commonly used to build interior walls. This fluorescent textile, commonly used in construction for safety and visibility, is stretched and covered in iron oxide, giving the works a bodily, fleshlike appearance. The material symbology of Karmali’s work points to the underlying sociopolitical systems of exploitation, migration, distribution, and regeneration.

Karmali holds an MPS from School of Visual Arts, New York. Solo exhibitions include Eternal Rent, Management, New York; Bound Between Cliffs, Circle Gallery, Nairobi; Paper Planes, Sotheby’s Institute, New York. Group exhibitions include the 2024 Dakar Biennale, Senegal; Invocations, Circle Art Agency, Nairobi; Open Call, The Shed, New York; Omniscient: Queer Documentation in an Image Culture, Leslie Lohman Museum, New York; Second Careers, Cleveland Museum of Art; and Making Africa at High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Blanton Museum, Houston, CCCB, Barcelona, Guggenheim Bilbao, and others. Karmali was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and a Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Residency. He was an artist in residence at The Watermill Center and Montello Foundation, Triangle Arts Association, Pioneer Works, Trestle Gallery, the MacDowell Colony, and BRIC.