Over the past several months, Mississippi-based artist Shuriya Davis has focused on finding new expressions for ancient forms. In At the Feet of the Master, the artist’s second solo show with STARS, Davis realizes this process as thirteen new paintings with imagery derived primarily from Greco-Roman sculptural references.

At the Feet of the Master articulates an accepting yet not reverent relationship to institutions and their conflicted capacities to guard, limit, and provide historical artistic knowledge. Davis pored over the online collections of the Louvre, the Smithsonian, and museums at RISD and Harvard for stone figures and busts from European antiquity. They then translated these references into swaths of unlifelike colors, often working with bright tones but, on each canvas, a restricted palette. 

In both Head of Woman 1 and Head of Woman 2, we see the same truncated profile (perhaps the nose of this original has been lost to time, we are left to wonder unless we dig up the reference image). The hair—a color field with thick, wavy lines layered atop it—takes up around a third of the painting. Can we see up the inside of her fragmented neck? That’s indeterminate: the neck’s hollow is not the same color that defines the eyes or nostrils or mouth—but not all of these organs are holes, exactly, either. Side-by-side, these pictures of the same estranged subject appear less like twins than inverses, and indeed between pictures a color that depicts a highlight in one might be a shadow in another. Although we know those original sculptures were once polychrome, these colors were certainly unavailable to ancients. These paintings are photo negatives for a world of inconsistent surfaces, of colors continually in flux. 

Elsewhere, following original formal effects leads to surprising discoveries. In Aphrodite de Cnide, Davis elevates the anatomical contrasts of the original fourth-century-BCE sculpture by isolating the torso from the pelvis, creating an uncanny collage-like image: Aphrodite as chimera. 

Distinct from the more gestural work of Davis’s projects from the past few years, the paintings in At the Feet of the Master feature thick, controlled strokes, sometimes layered with gesso to the point of seeming to hide another archaeological image beneath. However, as throughout their oeuvre, these figures are liberated from certain spatial hierarchies—detached from their backgrounds even as they interact with one another, such as in the two-panel work The Three Graces 3.

The show’s title comes from a 1910 book of the same name by the spiritual figure Jiddu Krishnamurti. He wrote At the Feet of The Master at age fourteen to advocate Theosophical religious values. (Later in life, Krishnamurti would distance himself from the faith, advising against following disciplines and authorities, himself included, and arguing that “truth is a pathless land.”) As they developed this series, Davis regularly returned to Krishnamurti’s writings, uncovering inspiration. In this solo presentation, mastery’s definitions expand: of course, there are the old exemplars of the Western art historical canon they use as source material, but there is also the mastery—spiritual and personal and laborial—that goes into being an artist navigating the unresolved boundaries of work time and free time, institutionalization and liberty, self-promotion and self-reflection, artmaking and administration. 

As with the simultaneous enthusiastic irony and self-effacing genuineness to the title At the Feet of the Master, the concept of an artistic “practice” can be read as double entendre. “Practice” signals one’s artistic activity as such, but it also has its more colloquial meaning: exercising toward proficiency. An artistic practice becomes one’s ongoing process in approaching “mastery”—and previous purported masters—that finds oneself always no closer to completing this impossible task. 

Davis lovingly appropriates these paradoxes. Their reuse of the Classical forms doesn’t cede ground to a narrow version of representation, but creates an environment for them to hone their own decidedly non-Classical approach to figure and form, which feels to have traveled through abstract expressionism and conceptualism as much as any marble busts. Davis says that they are “wielding Classical representations to master my own ability at rendering figures and form.” This begs the question: who is at whose feet? The paintings in At the Feet of the Master defamiliarize and reimagine these ancient creations, allowing painting to use the history of art to describe the still unknown.