Lafleur & Bogaert in New York

Frosch & Co is pleased to present Lafleur & Bogaert in New York, the first solo exhibition in the U.S. by artist duo Lafleur & Bogaert, bringing together two distinct worlds in a shared visual dialogue. The exhibition features three bodies of work, Twa Drapo, J’aime RD Congo, and Anba Dlo, including both premiering series and ongoing projects originating from earlier phases, confronting global inequities through found materials and cross-cultural wit. Belgian artist and former human rights lawyer Tom Bogaert and Haitian portrait painter Michel Lafleur met through Port-au-Prince’s Ghetto Biennale, a platform connecting local and international artists, and have collaborated since 2013. Their joint practice merges Lafleur’s vibrant sign-painting roots and Bogaert’s professional background into a visual language of justice, multivalence, and improvisation. In Twa Drapo, Lafleur poses in self-portraits inspired by Haitian Vodou flags and European medieval banners, subverting xenophobic narratives with tenderness, animal companionship, and irony. J’aime RD Congo transforms everyday Congolese shopping bags into painted cultural emblems, bridging commentary of global art circuits with site-specific socio-economies. Anba Dlo (“underwater” in Haitian Créole) dives into the material and spiritual fallout of the diasporic Middle Passage. It links the placeless reverence of water graves to the precarity of migratory island life using found materials, Congolese masks, and fragments of tourist debris. Lafleur & Bogaert in New York embodies poet Kamau Brathwaite’s famous expression “unity is submarine”, through a cross-Atlantic collaboration of resilience, humor, and imagination. Michel Lafleur began his painting career as an apprentice to a decorator of Tap-Taps, the ornately painted pickup trucks that serve as public transportation all throughout Haiti. He is now responsible for decorating many of the most spectacular barbershops in his neighborhood. His work was included in “PÒTOPRENS” at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn and the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami. At the age of 38, Tom Bogaert gave up his legal career as a refugee attorney for the UN and Amnesty International to settle in New York as an artist. He had his first solo exhibition in 2008 at Jack the Pelican Presents gallery in New York. He currently lives and works in Budapest, Hungary. His artistic practice is structured around long-term, site-specific projects that examine the intersections of geo-politics, entertainment, art, and propaganda.

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34 E Broadway

Downtown, NY