Devendra Banhart. Offering Cloud of Scattered Genitalia
© Lauren Dukoff
Devendra Banhart was born in 1981, in Houston, Texas, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Banhart spent his early years in Caracas, Venezuela, before moving back to the U.S. in his teens, settling in Southern California. He is an internationally acclaimed musician, poet, and visual artist, regarded as a pioneer of the ‘freak folk’ and ‘New Weird America’ movements. Throughout his career, Banhart has toured, performed, and collaborated with notable artists like Vashti Bunyan, Yoko Ono, ANOHNI, Caetano Veloso, and Beck, among others.
Alongside this successful career in music (which has brought him to Portugal on several occasions to play concerts at renowned festivals and concert halls - notably, in November 2023, at the Coliseu in Lisbon and the Theatro Circo in Braga), the artist, who studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, has maintained a very unique career as a visual artist since the mid-2000s, exhibiting his distinctive and often enigmatic drawings and paintings in galleries worldwide, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
In addition to painting or drawing most of his own album covers (the album artwork for his 2010 album What Will We Be was nominated for a Grammy), he has engaged in numerous art projects, including Doug Aitken's large-scale video installation Song 1 on the façade of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and the sound installation Refuge at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. His fusion of music and visual arts has led to performances at prestigious institutions such as MoMA in New York, MoCA in Los Angeles, the Hammer Museum, LACMA, and a performance in the Cy Twombly room at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles.
His work as a visual artist, including his drawings and watercolors, can now be seen for the first time in Portugal, in the exhibition ‘Offering Cloud of Scattered Genitalia’. In addition to exploring the close relationship between Devendra Barnhart's musical and visual expression, the exhibition will also include excerpts from Banhart’s poetry, revealing the whole of Devendra Barnhart’s artistic universe.
Recent exhibitions include: Devendra Banhart. Total Pink Cosmos in Square White Cloud, Fondazione Nicola del Roscio, Rome (2024, solo); The Grief I Have Caused You, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, Ca (2022); Other Flowers, Hauser and Wirth, Los Angeles, Ca (2019); Voglio proprio vedere, Mazzoli, Modena, Italy (2017); Sphinx Interiors & Other Works, Mazzoli, Modena, Italy (2014, solo); Abstract Rhythms: Paul Klee and Devendra Banhart, SFMoMA, San Francisco (2007–2008); Music is a Better Noise, MoMA PS1, Queens, New York (2007); and Devendra Banhart, Mazzoli, Modena, Italy (2006, solo). His monograph of drawings and paintings I Left My Noodle on Ramen Street (2015, Prestel) features essays by Jeffrey Deitch and Beck.