In “Towards A New Mythology,” the Chicago-born artist turns portraiture, architecture and the public sidewalk into powerful territories of memory, labour and belonging.
Luxembourg: There are exhibitions that present new works, and there are exhibitions that ask us to reconsider the structures, physical, historical and social, through which we understand the world around us. Yashua Klos’s upcoming solo exhibition, 'Towards A New Mythology', at Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery belongs firmly to the latter.
"Pieces-of-Justice-scaled" by Yashua KLOS - Woodblock prints, acrylic, and colored pencil on archival paper, and Japanese rice paper, 117.5 x 171 cm (46 1/4 x 67 3/8 in)
In this compelling new body of work, the Chicago-born, New York-based artist continues his distinctive exploration of monumental portraiture, fragmented surfaces and constructed identities. Yet here, Klos pushes his visual language further into the architecture of the American city, confronting a fundamental question: Who builds the city, who is represented by it, and who has the right to claim its spaces and histories?
Klos has long approached portraiture as something that can be assembled, fractured and rebuilt. Known for transforming woodblock printing into a sculptural form of collage, he carves blocks to capture the organic grain of wood, transfers those textures onto paper, then cuts, layers and interlocks the printed fragments into imposing figurative compositions. The visible seams are essential. His subjects do not emerge as seamless representations but as identities formed through memory, family, ancestry, labour and reconstruction. In Towards A New Mythology, those fragmented portraits encounter another visual vocabulary: Art Deco architecture.
Artist Yashua KLOS at his Studio, Supplied by Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery
Growing up in Chicago, Klos was surrounded by municipal buildings whose Art Deco ornamentation projected authority, permanence and civic ambition. Such architectural languages often drew upon imagery associated with ancient Greece and Rome, reinforcing narratives of monumentality, civilization and institutional power. Klos disrupts that symbolism. His dimensional portrait busts intersect with grids, construction materials and fractured Art Deco motifs, while the faces themselves draw upon amalgamated representations of friends and family members who work in city maintenance and construction.
The intervention is significant. Instead of allowing civic architecture to remain simply a symbol of institutional authority, Klos redirects attention toward the people whose labour actually constructs, maintains and sustains urban life. The monument is no longer only the building. The worker becomes monumental. Through this reversal, Klos proposes another kind of civic mythology, one in which people historically pushed to the margins of official narratives are brought directly into the visual language of permanence, strength and public memory.
Among the particularly intriguing developments in the exhibition are Klos’s “sidewalk” collages, inspired by text and imagery etched into concrete pavement. The sidewalk might appear ordinary, but within Klos’s practice it becomes something profoundly democratic. Unlike the imposing façade of a government building or the protected interior of an institution, the sidewalk belongs to everyday movement. People cross it, gather upon it, protest on it and leave traces within it. Anyone can approach it. Anyone can mark it.
In this sense, Klos connects the accessibility of pedestrian space with another recurring element in his work: the grid. Rather than dictating a single point of entry, the grid allows the eye to move across the composition from multiple directions. It becomes a structure capable of holding many fragments, and many histories, simultaneously. The sidewalk therefore operates almost as an urban archive, preserving small declarations of individual existence against the uncertainty of time.
"Find A Hole In History To Place Yourself In" 2026 by Yashua KLOS - Woodblock prints and colored pencil on archival paper and muslin. Framed: 160.5 x 113 cm (63 1/4 x 44 1/2 in)
This relationship between public space, collective memory and resistance becomes especially charged in Who’s Streets? Our Streets(2026). Its geometric construction evokes the monumentality of the pyramids of Giza, while its title recalls the call-and-response chant heard during the 2020 protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Within Klos’s visual world, the phrase moves beyond the temporary moment of protest. It becomes an inscription. A declaration. A claim to visibility.
By placing contemporary Black experience in conversation with architectural forms associated with permanence and ancient civilization, Klos challenges the question of whose histories societies choose to monumentalize. And perhaps this is where 'Towards A New Mythology' becomes particularly relevant. Klos is not simply dismantling an existing mythology. He is asking what might replace it.
Artist Yashua KLOS at his Studio, Supplied by Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery
Born in Chicago in 1977, Yashua Klos received his BFA from Northern Illinois University in 2000 and his MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York, in 2009.His practice has gained increasing institutional recognition. Recent exhibitions include Ancestral: Afro-Americas at the Museum of Brazilian Art FAAP (2024) and the traveling survey Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary Collage, presented at the Frist Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Phillips Collection. His first major institutional solo exhibition, Yashua Klos: OUR LABOUR, curated by Tracy Adler, was presented at the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College in 2022. His works are held in collections including the Brooklyn Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art and the Wellin Museum of Art.
Klos has also undertaken residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center, Vermont Studio Center and Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and has received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship and a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant. He currently lives in Queens and works in Brooklyn.
At a moment when conversations around monuments, public space, representation and historical memory continue to reshape cities across the world, 'Towards A New Mythology' arrives with particular resonance. Klos reminds us that a city is never simply its skyline. It is the accumulation of hands that built it, communities that inhabited it, histories that were recorded, and histories that were not. Through wood grain, paper, fractured portraits, architectural ornament and the seemingly ordinary surface of the sidewalk, he constructs an alternative monument to collective existence. The exhibition promises to reward close looking. What initially appears fragmented gradually reveals connections between family and architecture, labour and dignity, protest and permanence, private memory and public history.
If traditional mythology tells us who societies once chose to immortalize, Yashua Klos asks a more urgent question: who deserves to become part of the mythology we are creating now? Towards A New Mythology, presented by Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery is an exhibition to watch and, more importantly, one to experience.
Exhibition Details:
TITLE - YASHUA KLOS TOWARDS A NEW MYTHOLOGY
15 September – 17 October 2026 @ ZIDOUN-BOSSUYT LUXEMBOURG, 6 RUE ST ULRIC, L-2651 LUXEMBOURG
* By Rengi Cherian - Editor - Art4you Magazine