Make America Great Again: Awol Erizku, Ben Brown Fine Arts

It was – and remains – this year’s internet photo sensation... pregnant, blossoming Beyoncé under an ultra sheer white veil, looking to camera, side on, ripe with two children, in bra and mismatched satin briefs, and backed by a Technicolor floral triumphal arch and the bluest of blue skies. Total artifice, of course – and instantly Instagrammed millions upon millions of times around the globe.

That is how an über-celebrity pregnancy is announced in 2017. The image, an instant icon, was the creation of one of the sharpest young blades in American photography’s top drawer.

Awol Erizku, in his late twenties but firmly established as a major force in image-making, set up the whole Beyoncé shot and clicked the button. It’s his work, every historic pixel of it. After studying art in New York, his first show was only as recently as 2012, picturing black sitters in classic Western art poses. Knowing jokeyness abounds in Erizku’s work – riffing on Vermeer in his 2012 work Girl with a Bamboo Earring, and referencing Duchamp and hip-hop.

Now based in New York and Los Angeles, Erizku is showing a selection of new work at Ben Brown Fine Art, in Mayfair – his first show in Europe. The exhibition – Make America Great Again, named after Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign slogan that was re-used by Donald Trump – is a response to what the artist describes as the ‘racism and bigotry’ on the rise in the US. A great chance to see a US photography star rising over Europe.