NEW YORK: Serge Alain Nitegeka

Serge Alain Nitegeka, Field Configuration XVIII, 2015, Paint on wood, 83 1/2 x 124 3/4 inches  212 x 317 cm. © Serge Alain Nitegeka. Photo credit: Jason Wyche via marianneboeskygallery.com.

Serge Alain Nitegeka, Field Configuration XVIII, 2015, Paint on wood, 83 1/2 x 124 3/4 inches  212 x 317 cm. © Serge Alain Nitegeka. Photo credit: Jason Wyche via marianneboeskygallery.com.

Colour & Form in BLACK

March 17 - April 23, 2016

Opening reception: Thursday, March 17, 2016, 6:00 - 8:00pm

MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY

506 West 24th Street

New York, NY

From Marianne Boesky Gallery e-blast:

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Colour & Form in BLACK, a solo exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Burundi-born, Johannesburg-based artist Serge Alain Nitegeka at its flagship Chelsea location. The exhibition presents a new body of work that demonstrates the artist’s recent experimentations with form, color, and space. Colour & Form in BLACK is Nitegeka’s second solo exhibition since joining the gallery in 2014.

This exhibition presents the current trajectory of Nitegeka’s practice, in which the artist pursues a visceral and unmediated engagement with formal questions of line, color and volume. Here, Nitegeka deepens his commitment to abstraction, evoking Russian constructivism with these works’ clean, structured lines and boldly oscillating colors, compositions notably born not from forethought, but rather from the freeform aesthetic spontaneity that alights when artist and picture plane meet.

The resultant compositions – in both two and three dimensions – appeal to the viewer’s visual, tactile and spatial senses. Lines and shapes are rendered in shades of black, robin’s egg blue, ivory white, golden yellow, and deep crimson, both shaping space and denying it, framing it and setting it free. Demonstrating the artist’s ongoing move into pure abstraction, they encourage the viewer’s intuitive, aesthetic engagement, in a manner that befits the organic conditions of their own creation.

Nitegeka evokes the transcendental force and rich potential of the colour black to illustrate the ineffable essence of these works:

“The colour black is primordially predisposed to a deep, dark, mysterious simplicity. It doesn’t need to be explained, it refuses to be enlightened. It just is. However, given form and in the company of other colours, the colour black reveals itself robust and beautiful, proving itself a flat mental space void of everything yet rich in anything; a solid, ambiguous colour. The colour black is my point of departure from the unknown into the unknown. I don’t know where I am from or where I am headed. I am from the black heading back into the black.”

Serge Alain Nitegeka’s practice comprises abstract painting, sculpture, large-scale installation, and figurative drawing, repurposing modernist preoccupations with line and the picture plane to address larger cultural and political issues. Nitegeka’s work has been shown throughout South Africa, Senegal, Europe, and the United States. His first solo exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, Morphings in BLACK, opened in November 2014 at the BOESKY EAST, the gallery’s Lower East Side location. In 2015, Nitegeka’s work was included in the South African Pavilion at the 56th international Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia , as well as the Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Gothenburg, Sweden. In spring 2015, he presented his largest site-specific installation to date, Structural Response II, at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA. Nitegeka (b. 1983, Burundi) currently lives and works in Johannesburg.

Exhibit Link

NEW YORK: Adejoke Tugbiyele

Adejoke Tugbiyele, The Love Boat, 2016, palm spines, copper wire, threaded rods, 26 x 72 x 10 inches.
Image via Skoto Gallery.

Grassroots

February 25 - April 9, 2016

Artist’s reception: Thursday, February 25, 2016, 6:00pm - 8:00pm

SKOTO GALLERY

529 West 20th Street, 5th Floor

New York, NY

From Skoto Gallery e-blast:

Skoto Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent works by the Nigerian-American artist Adejoke Tugbiyele. This is her first solo show at the gallery.

Adejoke Tugbiyele’s work is informed by a sophisticated discourse on traditional philosophical concepts, a deep understanding of the aesthetic and cultural character of the African continent as well as an invigorating inclination and facility with various materials and methods. By inventively handling her material within a formalist sculptural framework, combined with a highly developed experimental approach to making art, she creates work that is unorthodox, persistently innovative, and ignores boundaries between different cultural heritages and socially constructed constraints.

Tugbiyele’s sculptural process combines the weaving of fibrous materials such as palm spines around light metal structures, producing abstract figurative forms with universal elements of androgyny, armor, flight, seduction, myth and mystery. Her practice is influenced by multiple genres including ready-made/assemblage, architecture and performance/film. While her work does not openly narrate the events in her life, they are certainly rooted in her cultural, political and emotional experiences as she continuously explore strategies that fuse her aesthetic concerns with playful ironies and poetic metaphors. Despite the fact that she does not avoid the significance of content in her work, they still manage to tell stories of hope and courage, of compassion and resilience that speak to the triumph of the human spirit.

 

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1977 to Nigerian immigrants, and raised for seven years in Lagos Nigeria, award-winning artist/activist Adejoke Tugbiyele boldly, yet delicately weaves complex ideas about race, gender, sexuality, spirituality and migration. Tugbiyele's work has been exhibited at reputable institutions around the world including the Brooklyn Museum, The Newark Museum, The Museum of Arts and Design, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, The Reginald F. Lewis Museum, The Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos Nigeria, The Goethe-Institut (in Lagos, Nigeria and Washington D.C), The Centre for Contemporary Art, Torun, Poland, and The United Nations. Tugbiyele's work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, The Newark Museum and in significant private collections in the United States and Hong Kong.

Adejoke Tugbiyele is the recipient of several awards including being named Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2015, a Fulbright U.S. Student Fellowship in 2013, the 2014 Serenbe Artist-in-Residence, the 2013 Amalie Rothschild Award, and the 2012 William M. Phillips Award for best figurative sculpture. In 2014, images of her sculptural works graced the first-ever United States publication of poetry by the African Poetry Book Fund. Her work has been mentioned and featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, Artsy, Financial Mail, This Day Live, The Feminist Wire, The Star Ledger, Intense Art Magazine, Africanah, Okay Africa, Art South Africa, Mail & Guardian, and ArtThrob. In 2014, she appeared on CNN International as the first openly gay woman of Nigerian heritage to come out in the media. Tugbiyele received a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from The New Jersey Institute of Technology and a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Maryland Institute College of Art.

Exhibit Link