In a New Light | Kianja Strobert on Francis Bacon’s “Study of a Head”

Kianja Strobert (Yale MFA 2006) will talk with Mark Aronson, deputy director and chief conservator, Yale Center for British Art, about Francis Bacon’s Study of a Head (1952). 

About Kianja Strobert

Kianja Strobert is known for her dynamic and expressive mixtures of abstraction and realism in which themes of the mimetic are stretched across sculpture and painting. Often working in series, Strobert focuses on rhythm and pace. Her visual motifs, which orbit around conversations of class and labor, often pair images with flat spans of color. Though her work incorporates many nameable modes of expression, including abstraction, photography, and assemblage, she moves in and out of dialogues with material, never straying far from tactility as an anchor and expression of desire. Her work is inspired by many interdisciplinary artists and movements whose attitudes are turned toward exploring function, leisure, and the human-made.

Strobert’s work was recently acquired by the collections of the National Centre for Visual Arts in France and the US Embassy in Mozambique. Solo exhibitions have included the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Calif.; Marinaro Gallery, NY; and Campoli Presti, Paris. She has been included in numerous group exhibitions including at Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, NY; Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Lehmann Maupin, NY; and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004 and her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2006. An assistant professor in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University, Cambridge, she lives and works in New York.