King Paris: GUARDIANS
Friedrichs Pontone is pleased to announce GUARDIANS, a forthcoming exhibition featuring works by King Paris.
In Guardians, King Paris reimagines ancestral African traditions within the language of contemporary painting and sculpture.
Drawing from centuries-old traditional forms, ceremonial objects, and spiritual iconographies, the works confront the entangled legacies of heritage, memory, and cultural survival.
Each figure operates simultaneously as protector and witness—sentinels who guard both the past and the future. Rendered through advanced fabrication processes, the sculptures embody a dialogue between technology and tradition, between permanence and fragility. Their presence invites reflection on how objects can carry both the weight of history and the possibility of renewal.
At the heart of the exhibition lies a meditation on guardianship itself: Who holds memory? Who preserves culture? And what does it mean to inherit a fragmented legacy in a world shaped by displacement and erasure?
By staging these figures as a collective assembly, Guardians transforms Friedrichs Pontone into a site of reverence, resistance, and pre-colonial projection. The works do not seek resolution; rather, they demand encounters.
You are asked to stand before them, not as a passive spectator, but as participants in a continuum of remembrance and imagination.