Khari Turner (b. 1991) is an American painter based in New York who received his MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2021. His work, combining figuration and abstraction, centres on Black identity, history and ancestry. He paints with water gathered at places of personal or historical significance, from the Milwaukee River to the coast of Senegal, and his portraits deliberately omit the eyes so the faces speak of shared experience.
Khari Turner (b. 1991, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA) is an American painter based in New York. He studied at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee and received his MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2021. Turner’s work centres on Black identity, history and ancestry, combining figuration with abstraction. A defining feature of his practice is the use of water collected from places of personal or historical significance, such as the Lower Manhattan docks, the Milwaukee River, Lake Michigan, the Pacific Ocean and the coast of Senegal. Water entered his work during a 2020 residency near Venice Beach, California, and for him it also serves as a metaphor: he describes people as “bodies of water” that meet and merge. His portraits typically focus on facial features such as noses and lips and deliberately omit the eyes, so that the faces stand for a collective rather than an individual experience. Alongside the water he uses oil, acrylic, charcoal, ink and sand. His first solo exhibition in New York, “Breathing Water to Air”, was held at Ross-Sutton Gallery in 2021, and in 2022 he exhibited at CFHILL in Stockholm and in a project linked to the Venice Biennale. The work “Red Tides Moon Glow” (2020), offered by TUMO Gallery, is painted in oil, acrylic, charcoal and ocean water on black paper and belongs to the year in which water became central to his art.
