I Love It When You Beg

Palo Gallery is pleased to present I Love It When You Beg, the second solo exhibition by Liberian painter Lewinale Havette at Palo Gallery. Featuring a body of work across painting, work on paper, and sculpture, the exhibition uses the female body as its gravitational center. Havette offers a visceral exploration of how history and devotion shape presence, and how memory is held and transmitted across generations. “In my practice, the female body remains a living archive where power, transcendence, rupture, love, death, war, and sex meet. In I Love It When You Beg, I explore how the body absorbs and carries histories of domination and devotion, existing as both sovereign and violated, fractured yet whole,” says Lewinale Havette. Working with an intuitive and physically engaged approach, Havette utilizes oil sticks, diluted oil paint, and unconventional tools, including razor blades, to carve, scrape, and blur her surfaces. This process of instinctual mark-making produces dense compositions where gesture becomes both language and extraction. From accumulated gestures, figures emerge momentarily before slipping back into expanding fields of colour, movement, and emotion. In the exhibition’s largest work, The Devil Made Me Do It, the painting reads almost narratively, from left to right. The form of a reclined torso is surrounded by lines depicting hands and limbs, but as one travels across the work, the composition increases in seething density. The churning brushstrokes may allude to masses, bodies or oceans, but undoubtedly require deep looking and restless interpretation. The paintings in the exhibition mark a clear shift in Havette's practice, where she has embraced the emotional release and chaos of the abstract. While clear facets are still present, they have begun to meld with the composition, creating a space where figure and abstraction shift between one another. The elements of photo transfer in Havette’s practice have faded into a more raw and immediate kind of storytelling. Each canvas is approached as an unknown, with only the tools of emotion and the spiritual as its guide. A significant development in Havette’s practice is the introduction of a new body of sculptural works. These pieces combine West African ritual wood with European stone, nurturing a dialogue between distinct spiritual and cultural lineages. By uniting these materials, Havette challenges inherited religious and aesthetic systems, revealing the layered connections between power, belief, gendered authority, and ritual as lived through the body. Throughout I Love It When You Beg, the body is continuously reimagined, at once vulnerable and sovereign, fractured yet whole. Material, gesture, and memory converge to reshape the conditions under which power is seen, felt, and held. Lewinale Havette (b. 1990, Monrovia, Liberia) is a painter whose work examines feminine identity through the lens of African spirituality, religion, sensuality, and shifting power dynamics. Rooted in early memories of her maternal grandmother in a Liberian village, her practice engages a sense of the sacred and the unseen that continues to inform her visual language. These formative encounters with what she understands as magic, remain present in her work as a quiet, generative force. In the studio, Havette translates memory, vision, and dream into layered compositions that move between the figurative and the ethereal. Her paintings often feature spirits, water deities, and other symbolic presences that act as conduits for exploring the relationship between the body, belief, and transformation. At the center of this inquiry is the female body, understood as both axis and origin, a site through which cycles of life and death, love and war, sacrifice, and the making and unmaking of civilizations unfold. Through restrained palettes, dense surfaces, and deliberate mark-making, she constructs spaces where presence and absence coexist, and where meaning emerges through accumulation and erasure. Working with oil paint alongside materials such as wood, iron, and stone, Havette builds images that hold both physical weight and spiritual resonance. Her work reflects an ongoing inquiry into how histories are carried within the body and how identity is shaped through memory, migration, and inheritance. Attentive to both rupture and continuity, her paintings consider what persists, what transforms, and what remains just beyond articulation. Lewinale Havette’s work has been recognized through exhibitions at leading museums and international art fairs, including Art Cologne, the Houston Museum of African American Culture, the Masur Museum of Art, Wehrmühle Museum, the 1–54 Contemporary African Art Fair, Untitled Art Fair Miami, and the Aspen Art Fair. She was also represented by the Pérez Art Museum Miami at Art Basel Miami.

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