Victoria Miro Gallery, London, United Kingdom
04 Oct 2016 - 05 Nov 2016
Super Blue Omo, 2016. Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida. Purchase acquired through the generosity of Jim and Irene Karp, 2016. © Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Victoria Miro presents Portals, the first major solo exhibition in Europe by Njideka Akunyili Crosby.
The Los Angeles-based artist, who relocated from Nigeria to the United States at the age of 16, draws on art historical, political and personal references to make luminous, densely layered figurative compositions whose intricate surfaces combine disparate materials and aesthetic traditions. An amalgam of processes including painting, drawing and photo-transfer techniques are harnessed in large-scale works on paper that, precise in style, nonetheless conjure the complexity of contemporary experience.
Talking about her work, she notes, ‘in much the same way that inhabitants of formerly colonised countries select and invent from cultural features transmitted to them by the dominant or metropolitan colonisers, I extrapolate from my training in Western painting to invent a new visual language that represents my experience – which at times feels paradoxically fractured and whole – as a cosmopolitan Nigerian.’
The title of the exhibition, Portals, is immediately suggestive of windows or doorways, though one might equally think of TV sets or computer screens. It also refers to the title of a recent work by the artist, Portals, 2016, now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Victoria Miro Gallery II
16 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW
