Until July 26, Galerie Templon is showcasing contemporary drawing by bringing together Omar Ba, Abdelkader Benchamma, Norbert Bisky, Oda Jaune and Chiharu Shiota around the group exhibition “From the Paper to the Wall”.

By bringing together these five international artists, Galerie Templon wanted to create a truly original and celebratory show. In this perspective, the artists were invited to appropriate the walls of the Brussels space, to create an array of unique wall installations. In direct dialogue with these ephemeral works, each artist presents a new series of drawings produced especially for the exhibition.

The five artists, members of the same generation and hailing from three different continents, Africa, Asia and Europe, represent a globalised world where different cultures meet, mingle and merge.

What their work has in common is the role given to drawing, elevated to the same rank as painting, sculpture and installations. Their drawing practice is thus given free rein to explore a range of tools, materials and supports as they cover the walls and appropriate the space.

The From the Paper to the Wall exhibition invites visitors on a journey where they can experience the same feelings of playfulness and freedom. It can be visited in the gallery from 6 June to 26 July and online via a dedicated website.

drawingroom.templon.com

_____________________________

GALERIE TEMPLON
Veydtstraat 13A
1060 Brussels – Belgium
Tuesday – Saturday, 11 am – 6 pm

The post Templon Gallery presents “From the Paper to the Wall” in Brussels appeared first on Artskop.

Gallery 1957 presents long-awaited works by Thameur Mejri

Based in Accra and working internationally, Gallery 1957 is dedicated to contemporary art. With a curatorial focus on West Africa, the gallery presents a programme of exhibitions, installations and performances by the region’s most significant artists. Gallery 1957 works with artists currently bridging the gap between local and international practices, including Serge Attukwei Clottey, Jeremiah Quarshie, Yaw Owusu, Gerald Chukwuma, and Godfried Donkor. For 1-54 New York, Gallery 1957 presents works by the Tunisian artist Thameur Mejri, in addition to his solo exhibition at the gallery in Accra from March 28 to May 7 included. 

Thameur Mejri cites, like Paul Klee before him, the same influence of Tunisia and its rich landscape as the colour catalyst for his latest series, Eroded Grounds. The human body occupies a special place in the artist’s work, which sometimes evokes the slow appropriation of the artist and his image in Europe because of the spiritual transcendencies and the relationship between the image of man and the divine, highlighted by religious culture. This conquest of his own body, the acceptance of its limits and its purely carnal dimension has not always been shown in the different European societies and Mejri explores the way in which the Arab-Muslim world maintains a complex and conflictual relationship on the subject, a pretext for so many other refoulements.

Galerie Cécile Fakhoury presents photgraphs of François Xavier Gbré

Opened in September 2012 and active in Dakar since 2018, the gallery offers a new perspective on creativity and exceptional artistic diversity in West Africa. The gallery presents new works by François xavier Gbré, Dalila Dalleas Bouzar, and Jems Robert Koko Bi.

François-Xavier Gbré was born in Lille, France, in 1978. He lives and works in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. He graduated with a degree in Photography from École Supérieure des Métiers Artistiques de Montpellier in France. While engaging with time and geography, his work summons the language of architecture as a witness of memory and social changes. From remnants of colonial times to landscapes that are redefined by current events, François-Xavier Gbré explores territories and revisits history.

Richard Tattinger Gallery presents works by Jorge Mayet and Frances Goodman

Jorge Mayet’s sculptures and installations draw from his experiences living as a Cuban exile in Spain. Suspended in midair, his photorealistic floating landscapes and uprooted trees offer ethereal, dream-like visions of his homeland. The exposed roots of the trees serve as a metaphor for diaspora, questioning the function of homeland. Mayet’s technique expands upon the region’s local craft traditions and honors the mysticism of the Yoruba religion, which was proliferated in Latin America by the Atlantic Slave Trade.

Born in 1975 and based in Johannesburg, South Africa, Frances Goodman is today considered one of the country’s leading artists. Her working practice, which includes installation, photography, sculpture and sound installations, focuses primarily on women and contemporary notions of beauty and desire. Her interests lie in female identity and the anxieties that manifest and are cultivated from the bombardment of the media as well as societal expectations and pressures (both self -imposed and external).  Her work is featured in collections of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA), South Africa; the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institute, USA; the Sindika Dokolo African Collection of Contemporary Art; and the Chase Manhattan Collection, USA.

Perve Galeria presents a core of Ernesto Shikhani’s work before and after the independence of Mozambique

Perve galeria presents a core of artworks which emphasize, politically speaking, the interventional character of Ernesto Shikhani’s work before and after the independence of Mozambique. Perve Galeria present also works of Shikhani at Frieze New York in 2 section.

In an initial section, there will be art works in which became evident that the artist clearly tries to transmit a message against the Portuguese colonial regime and dictatorship, representing them, most of the time, through monstrous beings. In this context, the human figure is practically non-existent or appears distorted and brutally oppressed.

A second section will reflect the post-independence period, when the author often represents the human figure with disproportionate hands, fingers and heads. His work again has a strophe of political and social intervention that is strongly related to the civil war. Here the works frequently reveal two human figures linked by the same body representing a same people but in conflict with himself. This type of composition is mainly made on paper, as it reflects a time when there was a profound social and economic transformation in the country and materials such as canvas became a very rare and expensive thing.

Born in 1934, in the Marracuene District, Ernesto Shikhani was part of a prominent group of artists in Mozambique who played a key role in broadening aesthetic reciprocity across Africa, Europe, and the USA. He began to devote himself to sculpture with the Portuguese master Lobo Fernandes at Núcleo de Arte, in Maputo, Mozambique. His latest drawings and paintings show traces and colors sometimes aggressive but also vibrant and radiant. In 2004, Perve Galeria held a retrospective exhibition of his 40 years of painting and sculpture. Ernesto Shikhani died on 31 December 2010, in Maputo, Mozambique.

Anne De Villepoix Gallery presents Omar Ba

Born in 1977 in Senegal, Omar Ba lives and works in Dakar and Geneva. His paintings, produced using a variety of techniques and materials, represent political and social motifs open to multiple interpretations. His artistic vocabulary raises historical and timeless questions while formulating a wholly contemporary artistic message.  Omar Ba’s iconography features personal metaphors, ancestral references and hybrid figures. This combination of heterogeneous elements illustrates his desire to abolish boundaries and categories. Omar Ba is represented by Templon gallery in France and Switzerland.

Galerie Magnin-A proposes works by Fabrice Monteiro, Vincent Michéa, among others

MAGNIN-A is a contemporary art gallery created in 2009 in Paris by André Magnin and directed by Philippe Boutté, renowned experts in modern and contemporary African art. As a talent discoverer, the MAGNIN-A gallery represents established and emerging artists. The gallery works with passion and conviction to promote and disseminate artists at the most important international fairs and exhibitions.

Born in 1972 in Namur, Fabrice Monteiro grew up in Benin. After studying industrial engineering, he began a career as a model, an opportunity for him to make his first contact with the photographic medium. After passing behind the lens, his first experiences will naturally be in the world of fashion, but very quickly, he decides to tell another story.

He lives and works in Dakar. Fabrice Monteiro’s photography and works occupy a rich space that spans all genres: photo-reportage, fashion images and portraits blend and collide to better reveal a “mixed” universe in the artist’s image. With his new series of works, Monteiro makes fun of the clichés that people of colour still suffer from and the way they are represented in people’s imaginations or in advertising.

Vincent Michéa was born in 1963 in Figeac, France, he lives and works between Paris and Dakar. After graduating from ESAG in Paris, he left for Dakar in 1986 to work as a graphic designer. It was in 1987 that he first exhibited his work of paintings and photos at the National Gallery of Senegal. Following this exhibition, he worked as an assistant to Roman Cieslewicz until 1991. Encouraged by this renowned graphic designer, he invested himself in an intense activity of painting creations. Vincent Michéa is also co-founder of the 100% DAKAR label and collaborates within the DKR studio in the 90s. In 2007 and 2008, he led photomontage workshops at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa. Since 2008, with the painter Moulay Youssef Elkahfai, Vincent Michéa has been in charge of the silkscreen printing workshop at the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Visuels in Marrakech.

Espace D’art Contemporain 14N 61W presents works by Jean Ulrich Désert and photographs by Robert Charlotte

Jean-Ulrick Désert is a conceptual and visual artist born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Désert’s art works vary in form: public billboards, actions, paintings, site-specific sculpture, video and art objects. They emerge from a tradition of conceptual work engaged with social and cultural practices. Well known for his “Negerhosen2000” his provocative “Burqa Project” and his poetic “Goddess Projects” Désert has said his practice may be characterized as visualizing “conspicuous invisibility.” He has exhibited widely at venues such as The Brooklyn Museum, The Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston, Grey Art Gallery NYU/Studio Museum of Harlem, Walker Art Center in the USA, la Cité Internationale des Arts in France, The Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst in Germany and in galleries and public venues as well in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Ghent, Brussels.

He is the recipient of awards, public commissions, private philanthropy, including Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Villa Waldberta-Munich, Kulturstiftung der Länder (Germany) and Cité des Arts (France). He received his degrees at Cooper Union and Columbia University (New York) and has been an invited lecturer and critic at universities in the United States (Princeton, Yale, Columbia), Germany (Humboldt University in Berlin) and in France (at the École supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris). He also advises and teaches for Trans Art Institute (based in New York).

It is from a social point of view that Robert CHARLOTTE‘s photography is oriented in the form of photographic portraits. He systematically examines the behaviours, attitudes and expressions of social groups. Born in 1966 in Martinique, where he grew up and lives, Robert CHARLOTTE was very interested in the family album at an early age, which gave him both pleasure and a trigger. From 1986 to 1989, he was in Paris at a photography school.

He lived there for 10 years, works in an industrial photography studio. He will learn the issues of reporting, illustration, commissioning, artistic proposal, team collaboration and the loneliness of the moment of release. Back in Martinique, he became interested in painting, meeting, interacting with and photographing painters in their workshops. He is a contributor to several publications.

14N61W is a contemporary gallery located in Martinique. The gallery presents a range of artistic positions in all media, focusing and focused on contemporary art in the Caribbean and around the world, the authenticity, the presence, projection and reflection of its artists in the art they produce, leaving the audience enthusiastic, sometimes puzzled, but never indifferent. The program of espace d’art contemporain 14N61W, is fuelled with exhibitions and projects revolving around concerns about artistic creation in relation to today’s social, economical, political and global issues.

Afronova gallery presents photographs of John Liebenberg

John Liebenberg lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he is born in 1958. He was introduced to Namibia in 1976 when, together with his fellow conscripts he was sent to Ondangwa Air-force base near the border with Angola. He later returned to Namibia and in 1985 was appointed photographer for a new weekly, “The Namibian”. Following independence he and his family moved to Johannesburg, from where he covered the Angolan civil war as freelancer for Reuters. He is a senior and established news photographer whose work has been exhibited in Africa and Europe. His Namibian photographic collection documenting Swapo’s war of Liberation and the South African occupation is widely used by historians, researchers and film makers.

L’agence à paris presents works by Dominique Zinkpè

Dominique Zinkpè‘s works refer to his environment and the context in which he finds himself. Identity is the roots, the consciousness of coming from somewhere, the tree that does not hide the forest. It is the audacity to testify, to affirm one’s voice clearly and clearly, says the artist. His approach is complex and diverse. Far from confining himself to a plastic writing, he appropriates all kinds of media as long as they allow him to express himself: installation, drawing, painting, sculpture, video. Zinkpè’s painting explores tortuous paths where the characters, halfway between a human being and an animal, evoke power games, masquerades or sex, no doubt alluding to our human comedy. Its unique feature is recognizable on the canvas; intimate, powerful, provocative.

L’Agence à Paris represents artists, mainly in the field of visual arts, of all nationalities, accompanying them in all stages of creation. The Agency is developing a unique and flexible model as a possible response to the rapid changes in the creative economies. It develops reflection and action with the desire to create healthy relationships with the art market.

Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien’s installations

Born in 1990, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien has lived in Paris since leaving Côte d’Ivoire in 2004 during the civil war. In her work, she seeks to juxtapose diverse cultural elements, bringing them together to form new, syncretic pieces with additional layers of meaning. Interested in the complex relationships between notions of a universal popular culture, everyday life, and traditional handmade construction processes, Manlanbien creates physical encounters between industrial and artisanal materials. She is inspired greatly by the traditional practices of the matriarchal Akan society in Côte d’Ivoire, who historically crafted weights in order to value gold. The artist speaks of her intention to create ephemeral, poetic narrations which are in perpetual renewal, resulting in tangible pieces which both ‘witness’ and ‘trace’ past diverse cultural histories. She is represented by 50 Golborne gallery.

50 Golborne’s gallery mission is to support and promote some of the best projects and productions developed by international visual artists, designers and makers. It especially supports those relevant to portraying and interrogating a world which is changing fast and in which the African continent and its international Diaspora plays a dynamic and significant role.

Addis Fine Art with new works of Nirit Takele

Nirit Takele, born in Ethiopia in 1985, immigrated to Israel in 1991 in “Operation Solomon” an Israeli military operation that transported more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 36 hours. Nirit presently works from her studio in Tel Aviv. Although she grew up with very few memories of her childhood in Ethiopia, Nirit has been painting from a very young age practising her skills by studying the works of artists like Peter Paul Rubens, Diego Riviera and David Hockney.

She explores her cultural heritage in her works, illustrating the everyday life of the Israeli Ethiopian community and finding inspiration in old Ethiopian sagas and folk tales remembered from her youth. Nirit is a bold colourist, building up faceted figurative bodies through the application of near abstract flat forms. She is represented by Addis Fine Art.

Addis Fine Art is a pioneering gallery based in Addis Ababa and London. The very first local space and international platform based in Ethiopia, the gallery focuses on highlighting modern and contemporary fine art from the Horn of Africa region and its diasporas.

Barnard Gallery presents works by Richard Mudariki

Often drawing on classic compositions from the Old Masters of European art history, Richard Mudariki reinterprets these iconic scenes with his own cast of human and animal characters, constructing a mise-en-scene which resituates the drama within a contemporary, Southern African social context. Mudariki tackles a widerange of political and social debates with an arresting and unique visual language characterized by bright colours, irrational spaces and perspectives, theatrical compositions and allegorical use of symbolism.

Often appealing to the viewer’s sense of humour, Mudariki’s theatricality nevertheless maintains a restless, foreboding energy in its engagement with the duplicity and deception, which characterizes so much of contemporary politics. In Mudariki’s quotations of iconic moments in European art, the artist also questions notions of canonicity and accepted narratives of art history, considering his position – and the position of African artists more generally – within it.

BARNARD was founded in 2010 by owner and director Christiaan Barnard and is home to a select group of contemporary artists. The gallery has hosted a number of significant solo exhibitions by its represented artists whose works have also been included in group shows at significant museums and institutions including amongst others IZIKO South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Zeitz MOCCA, Cape Town; Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon; Pratt Institute, New York; Foto Museum, Antwerp; BOZAR, Brussels, Museo Carlo Bilotti, Rome; Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice and The Center for Book Arts, New York.

Yossi Milo Gallery presents photographs of Kyle Meyer and Pieter Hugo

Meyer’s large scale works combine equal parts photographic portraiture and craft weaving. His photographs document men from the LGBTQ community in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), a nation where the local laws force queerness into hiding. Each man (or couple, in one instance) wears a headdress made from the brightly patterned wax fabric traditionally worn by women (selected by the sitter), upending our usual assumptions about clothing, gender, and beauty. Meyer then prints the images and then slices them up, meticulously interweaving the pictures with strips of the actual fabric from the headdress, creating hybrid works that merge image and object.

The success of Meyer’s works comes in the careful integration of separate conceptual frameworks, where the resulting fusion produces something more thoughtful and layered than the individual parts might have suggested on their own. Aside from the gender inversion of the headdress, the portraits are relatively straightforward, their massive scale forcing us into more intimate dialogue with the unidentified sitters. With the final portrait, Meyer presents each man’s individuality and beauty while using the fabric as a screen to protect his identity.

Established in 2000, Yossi Milo Gallery is dedicated to providing a platform for an influential community of artists working in all media, including photography, painting, sculpture, video and drawing.

1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair
Industria, 775 Washington St, New York, NY 10014, USA
May 3rd -5th 2019

http://1-54.com/

The post Exciting works to see at 1.54 Contemporary African Art Fair in New-York, May 3rd -5th 2019 appeared first on Artskop.

The Armory Show is New York City’s premier art fair, and a leading cultural destination for discovering and collecting the world’s most important 20th- and 21st-century art. Staged on Manhattan’s Piers 90, 92, and 94, The Armory Show, supported by Lead Partner Athena Art Finance, will open to the public March 7–10, 2019 features presentations by leading international galleries, innovative artist commissions, and dynamic public programs. Since its founding in 1994, The Armory Show has served as a nexus for the international art world, inspiring dialogue, discovery, and patronage in the visual arts. 

“A TOP DRAW FOR HEAVY-HITTING COLLECTORS, GALLERISTS, CELEBRITIES AND ART LOVERS”

NEW YORK TIMES 

The Armory Show’s 2019 edition (that celebrates its 25th anniversary this edition) will present 194 galleries from 33 countries, bringing together an unparalleled presentation of international galleries in central Manhattan. This year will also welcome 59 new exhibitors. Here is a short selection of exciting works from Africa and its diaspora, that you can expect to see at the show. 

AJARB BERNARD ATEGWA represented by Jack Bell Gallery ( London, England)

Ategwa’s works are large format and mimic the scale of cityscapes and public space. His paintings work as sequences in a larger narrative describing the chaos of his hometown, in Cameroon, where he was born. Moving between the taxi stands, newsagents, bars, roadside markets and fleeting moments of respite, the artist offers snapshots of everyday life. His vivid colour palette and graphic style speak the language of advertising familiar to Douala’s inhabitants. With great skill the artist weaves together urban scenes, sounds and smells to create a rich sensory immersion.

Jody Paulsen represented by SMAC Gallery (Cape Town, South Africa)

Jody Paulsen was born in Cape Town, South Africa where he currently lives and works. Working in textile, particularly felt, Paulsen, explores themes related to his understanding within the context of contemporary, material culture. His work speaks of the process of production as he creates vast, elaborate tapestries and colourful collage works. Various shapes, colours, logos and fonts reference the current age of capitalism and experiences of global culture that shape concepts of gender, sexuality and identity.

Zak Ové represented by Lawrie Shabibi Gallery (Dubai, UAE)

Ové seeks to reignite and reinterpret lost culture and mythology using new-world materials whilst at the same time paying tribute to both spiritual and artistic African identity. Constantly finding unpredictable ways to express recognisable, traditional African forms his practice explores African identity, the African diaspora and African history.

Tiwani Contemporary (London, England) will present works from Virginia Chihota 

Introspective in nature, Virginia Chihota‘s work is deeply influenced by personal experiences – landmark and everyday. In a reflection on intimacy and the human figure, she has addressed themes such as childbearing, childrearing, marriage, kinship, bereavement and faith. Having trained as a printmaker, Chihota’s use of screen-printing is as confident as it is original. She mixes printing techniques with drawing to produce unique works of striking formal complexity. She was born in 1983 in Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe and she lives and works in Podgorica, Montenegro. 

Mariane Ibrahim Gallery presents a solo booth dedicated to Haitian-American female artist, Florine Démosthène

Florine Demosthene was born in the United States and raised between Port-au-Prince, Haiti and New York. Démosthène earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Parsons the New School for Design in New York and her Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College, City University of New York. Using non-traditional materials like glitter and mylar, her work evoke a strong animated struggle, a fight over existing power. The superpositions of her alter-egos, reflect the resilience of the pre-fabricated codes of aesthetics dictated by a set of behaviors. One cannot escape the commodification and fetishization of the black body. The Artist is exposing a new physical paradigm, using gender and social attributes to escape determinism.

Works by Kapwani Kiwanga presented by Galerie Jerome Poggi (Paris, France)

Kiwanga’s work traces the pervasive impact of power asymmetries by placing historic narratives in dialogue with contemporary realities, the archive, and tomorrow’s possibilities. Her work is research-driven, instigated by marginalised or forgotten histories, and articulated across a range of materials and mediums including sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance. Kiwanga follows the lineage of surveillance and positions it in relation to blackness in America, from its roots in slavery to the role that technology performs today.

Works by Sadie Barnette presented by Charlie James  Gallery (Los Angeles, CA, USA)

Whether in the form of drawing, photography or large-scale installation, Sadie Barnette’s work relishes in the abstraction of city space and the transcendence of the mundane to the imaginative. She creates visual compositions that engage a hybrid aesthetic of minimalism and density, using text, glitter, family Polaroids, subculture codes and found objects. Recent works engage as primary source material the 500-page FBI surveillance file kept on her father, Rodney Barnette, who founded the Compton, California, chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968.

Works by Ibrahim El-Salahi presented by Vigo Gallery ( London, England) 

A leader of the Sudanese Khartoum School and the first African artist to have a retrospective at the Tate Modern in London, Ibrahim El Salahi combines European styles with traditional Sudanese themes in his art. El Salahi’s art encompasses and explores a range of compositional forms, including fragments of Arabic calligraphy, but perpetually evokes a transnational, African-influenced surrealism.

ACA Galleries ( New York  City, NY, USA) will present a selection of works by Faith Ringgold

The painted narrative quilts for which Ringgold is best known grew out of these early paintings, and denounce racism and discrimination with their subject matter. Combining quilt making, genre painting, and story telling through images and hand-written texts, the series “The American Collection” (1997) endeavors to rewrite African American art history, emphasizing the importance of family, roots, and artistic collaboration.

James Cohan Gallery (New York city, USA) will present a sculpture from Yinka Shonibare CBE

Over the past decades, Shonibare has become well known for his exploration of colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalization. Working in painting, sculpture, photography, film and installation, Shonibare’s work examines race, class and the construction of cultural identity through a sharp political commentary of the tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe and their respective economic and political histories. 

Omar Ba represented by Templon Gallery (Paris, France)

Born in 1977 in Senegal, Omar Ba lives and works in Dakar and Geneva. His paintings, produced using a variety of techniques and materials, represent political and social motifs open to multiple interpretations. His artistic vocabulary raises historical and timeless questions while formulating a wholly contemporary artistic message.  Omar Ba’s iconography features personal metaphors, ancestral references and hybrid figures. 

Jack Shainman Gallery (New York City, USA) will present a photography from Gordon Parks

During the late 1940s through the 1960s, Parks produced some of his most renowned photographic essays on issues relating to civil rights. A stoic portrait of Red Jackson, from a 1948 series on the Harlem gang leader, reveals a man seemingly hemmed in by his options as he stares intently out a broken window; the darkness of the interior contrasts forebodingly with the light illuminating him from the street. By showing the individual faces and families behind essentializing headlines of violence and relentless poverty, Parks stressed similarity over difference. His legacy, and the legacy of those he captured, remains very much alive in today’s America.

Richard Taittinger Gallery and Galleria Continua will present a major installation of Pascale Martine Tayou

Pascale Marthine Tayou (b. 1966, Nkongsamba) is an internationally renowned artist whose work is characterized by its variability, since he confines himself in his artistic work neither to one medium nor to a particular set of issues. Already at the very outset of his career, Pascale Marthine Tayou added an “e” to his first and middle name to give them a feminine ending, thus distancing himself ironically from the importance of artistic authorship and male/female ascriptions. His works not only mediate in this sense between cultures, or set man and nature in ambivalent relations to each other, but are produced in the knowledge that they are social, cultural, or political constructions.

The curator’s statement “Plastic bags are helpful, as well as harmful—they carry goods, cross borders, and contribute to plastic pollution. Tayou’s large and visually impressive installation, Plastic Bags (2019), takes ubiquitous objects and uses them to create an artwork that offers a colorful commentary on consumerism and globalism.”

The Armory Show – March 7-10 2019

Piers 90, 92, and 94
New York City

Public Days 

Thursday, March 7, 12pm — 8pm
Friday, March 8, 12pm — 8pm
Saturday, March 9, 12pm — 7pm
Sunday, March 10, 12pm — 6pm

The post Exciting works you can expect to see at the Armory Show in New York City March 7-10 2019 appeared first on Artskop.

Why such a title for your second exhibition at the Templon Gallery, “the autopsy of our consciences”?

In the world, I have noticed that things are repeating themselves, that they are not changing, especially the hardest ones, such as war and economic violence. There are real offices. I wanted to do an autopsy of these facts, analyze them. Put everything on the table.

The paintings are direct, quite engaged. Maybe more than before?

I took more things off, I went straight to the point. I no longer seek to embellish reality. The tracks are very muffled and at the same time, the criticism is direct. She’s not covered.

In your opinion, can art make a difference?

It can. The simple fact, concerning me, of saying all these things, of moving towards that, is a situation of comfort. I know that I am included in an economic system, that I am an artist in a commercial gallery. However, I have the freedom to say what I think, and I ask questions about these phenomena, loud and clear. Alone, I won’t change anything, but collectively, artists can.

Your works are marked by their verticality…

I favour verticality, that’s true. My compositions are often full-length characters. I myself look from the bottom up, very axially. Afterwards, this exhibition marks the appearance of the square, I gain in width. This allows me to make the compositions more complex, to include more characters.

You grew up in Dakar in the 1990s, at a time when the Senegalese art world was torn between Léopold Sédar Senghor’s “negritude” and alternative paths, such as Agit’art. Did it forge your way of looking at art?

At first, yes, but the fact of travelling, of living in Europe, all this made me leave this vision of the world. Today, my consciousness is made up of mixed influences. What I want is to build bridges between the North and the South…

By the way, is that what explains your transition from abstraction to figuration, when you arrived in Geneva?

Indeed, this passage was fuelled by frustration, the need to be understood. I came from Senegal, but people didn’t understand my work, didn’t know how to read my abstraction. I had to find a way to communicate that would work everywhere. Afterwards, some patterns remained, the color is still as important as ever… but my language is more universal.

Autopsie de nos consciences

Visit Omar Ba‘s profile on Artskop3437

Templon Gallery

The post Six questions for Omar Ba appeared first on Artskop.