At Art Paris African art galleries from Europe and the African continent showed their new works:

Artist Billie Zangewa with her beautiful hand sown collage  at South African gallery ArtNova. Getting pretty pricey! She has been showing her work for a long time and was included in museum shows but her work had not grabbed people’s attention like this time  in Paris.  People were lining up for her work! Part of this success comes from her long relationship with her gallery.

Omar Ba from Senegal Zone de non droit, 2017. He showed at Parisian Galerie Daniel Templon. I just love his work! So uniquely his! He has developed his own unique vocabulary rooted in local imagery and mythology while contending with global issues.

Remy Samuz’s wire sculpture Maternity, 2016 from Benin showing at Galerie Vallois. I have seen other artists doing work with wire like that but this piece makes me feel like I am seeing the figures in a dream.

Tiwani gallery director Maria Varnava concentrates on her work surrounded by the large mix media canvas by  Gareth Nyandoro from Zimbabwe and  Angolan Delio Jasse’s photographic series.

Mario Macilau from Mozambique  striking photograph at Ed Cross Fine art located in London.

A superb El Anatsui was hanging at London based October gallery. I wanted to grab it and take it home. A bit expensive though!

Nigerian artist Nnenna Okore‘s wall hanging Hide at October gallery . I interviewed her several years ago and wrote a post on her which you can find on my website and I am happy to see that her work is getting more exposure.

There were a lot of good work at the October gallery. Here is the work of Alexis Peskine Wolot Cosmic, 2017. I had not seen his work before or not paid attention , I am not sure, but this time I saw three portraits by him. Dramatic images, with a chiaroscuro effect conveyed through a painterly use of  nails  (yes it sounds strange but when you get closer you see a lot of nails)and moon gold leaf. His work was also shown at the exhibition at the Parc de la Villette, “Afriques Capitales ” and at the salon Zurcher Africa at La Galerie Africaine.

I stopped in front of Gosette Lubondo‘s photograph Imaginary Trip at L’Agence a Paris. She is a young emerging artist from Kinshasa (DRC) who was included in the Kampala Biennale. What a fantastic way of conveying yearning !

Namsa Leuba‘s series Zulu Kids was shown at Art Twenty One, a Lagos exhibition space. She favors a theatrical approach with an aesthetic informed by fashion and design sensibilities. There is something highly incongruous and unsettling in seeing this child isolated on a plinth in a barren landscape and whose dress and body paint points to traditional rituals.

I liked French born and of Algerian descent Dalia Dalleas Bouzar series of portraits at Galerie Cecile Fakhoury. These portraits based on photographs of women taken during the Algerian War infused these women with a regained dignity. They had been required to take off their veil at the time to create identity cards and they had experienced this public exposure as deeply debasing. Bouzar paints them here adorned in gold.

I was very taken by the work of a young Tunisian young woman Aicha Snoussi at A.Gorgi Gallery from Tunisia. Her drawings in  Le Livre des anomalies were exquisite, at times provocative. She had bought old school note books with pages that had turned slightly yellow with age and light and drawn in each one of them a set of intricate drawings emanating from an imaginary singular universe. Each book was laid down on a shelve along the wall of the gallery. Intense, edgy, Snoussi revealed to me her unusual mind and even weird perspective, at times microscopique and at times largely spatial. She goes from creating these minute drawings to entire wall drawings. She impressed me with her unusual imagination, utter joy in the creative process and  artistic breadth.. She is a young talent that deserves to be followed.

Moving on to London, I trekked to see Ibrahim Mahama sculptural work at the White Cube gallery. While Mahama’s work has been extremely well received I have only liked it at the 2015 Venice Biennale where the stitched together cast-off  jute sacks  were draped along the pathway in the Arsenale. For once the visual effect was as compelling as the conceptual underpinning of his work. The installation was fantastic. So I arrived at White Cube with mixed feelings. I actually was pleasantly surprised. There was more variety of texture, and shape in his wall hangings. I felt compelled to look closer and discover the intricacy of the layering.

The next sculptural installation,  a precarious assemblage of thousands of small shoe boxes made from found material to which was added other repurposed items such as heels, hammers was phenomenal. Precarious but strong! It was organized chaos.  No discernible pattern could be identified, it was an endless jumble of shapes, colors, and materials exemplifying ‘Mahama’s inquiry into the life of materials and dynamic potential.’

Moving from the grand scale of Mahama’s sculpture I ended my exploration with the delightful exhibition of drawings  of South African artist Lisa Brice at Stephen Friedman gallery. All drawn in cobalt blue gouache they offered an intimate portrait of feminine power and sensuality. I had never seen her work but I left totally charmed.

By then I was “arted out ” !

Gor Soudan’s approach is essentially conceptual. He greeted me in his new small studio not too far from the Circle Art Agency. He came to art by way of his passion for philosophy. Translating an idea, concept or observation into material form and letting the process of making  and the properties of the materials (wire, ink, metal) intuitively guide him are two of the guiding principles of his working process.

I first encountered Gor’s work in 2013 at the 1:54 Fair in London at the ArtLabAfrica’s booth. He was making figurative sculpture out of “protest wire”: fragments of the human form that felt deeply poetic in their incompleteness and nest-like forms. Gor favors working with materials he finds in his surroundings and at that time he was working out of a space in Kibera, a large slum on the edge of Nairobi and was recycling this wire which was left over from burned car tyres set afire during earlier riots.

His work has been well received and he is now able to afford his own space, which while  small by Western standard, is a real treat for Gor. He tells me how he used to weave the wire while sitting in a chair with the wire resting on his knees.

Equating this weaving process to drawing in space his subsequent investigations into drawing on paper were a logical move for him.

Currently he is particularly drawn to the Arabic wood carvings that one finds in Lamu and he is incorporating some of their patterns in his recent drawings.

I later went on to pay a visit to Michael Soi who has a studio in the GoDown art center situated in an abandoned industrial complex.

Known for his biting critique of China’s increasing presence in Kenya – his work is mostly satirical and critiques Kenya’s social, economic and political contemporary situation – he is currently pointing the finger at the rampant sex industry in Nairobi.

Deeply aware at the corruption crippling Kenya at all levels and seeing his art as an agent of change he deliberately makes his work explicit and easy to read. He wants his audience to get what he is saying. He paints cartoon-like scenes with flat and bright colors. His work resonates with a younger audience in Nairobi and as Danda says “ He brings a young dynamic Kenyan crowd because they get what he is doing. It’s social commentary, it is cheaky.” Next door to his studio is his shop where he sells totes that bear his signature style. A successful business it provides him with a safety net: “ I paint what I want to paint. I can do this because I have a safety net!”

Other artists to follow are:

Paul Ondoti

Jackie Karuti

Mimi Cherono Ng’OK

Muchiri Njenga

Total commitment to the art of mark-making.

Toyin Ojih Odutola just had her fourth solo show at Jack Shainman Gallery. Odutola’s medium of choice is drawing. She is quite aware of the inherent challenge to restricting her practice to drawing, which has always been considered in Western art as secondary to painting. Yet she embraces the medium with the same ambition, scale and vision that one would associate with painting and feels quite gratified that despite this prejudice her work is getting full recognition.

In this particular body of work she has eschewed color and limited her palette mostly to black and white. I remembered the vibrant colors of her previous show at Shainman and was at first taken aback. Yet quickly I became fascinated with her obsessive mark making and the patterns it creates. These patterns activate the surface of the skin, which loses its particularities and shifts from being something identifiable to something unstable. At times it is hard to say where one figure starts and the other ends. Odutola’s subject is portraiture and yet she says little about the identity of the people she chooses to portray. Identity is subsumed under the structured patterning. We don’t know if the skin is white or black. In this body of work she moves deliberately away from politics of identity – ie her Nigerian identity – and the prescribed idea of portraiture to focus on perception and art making.

Toyin Odutola’s latest work showing at Jack Shainman is exactly that. Toyin specializes in drawings and portraiture but her ink-layering process is very unique. In the past she worked almost exclusively with ballpoint (pen and ink) and focused mostly on the skin of her subjects creating a colorful shimmering effect.The figure was usually set against a white or black ground.

Toyin’s drawing technique with a ball point is a painstaking one and in a moment of frustration with the demands of this technique she decided to explore charcoal and pastel, which are looser mediums and allow for more freedom and broader range of movement.

In this new show the background has come alive. She has turned to a dense layering of pastels and charcoals and positioned her subjects – her two brothers – amidst rich textiles creating a dialogue between figure and ground.

While the subject matter is figurative, it was the sense of abstraction that caught my attention. She is still focusing on the skin of her subjects but now the patterns of mark making which map the skin geography become more abstract against the abstract motifs of the textile. She indicates to me that she sees the motifs on the textile as language and the marks depicting the skin as another language. One could say that the skin and fabric are engaged in a dialogue.

While traditionally the artist is meant to highlight the figure over the background here Toyin resists that impulse. Some of the figures actually feel like they are floating and don’t seem to be resting against the backdrop which enhances this sense of abstraction. My eyes shift continuously between background and foreground and have a hard time settling on either one; they are both so powerful. While Toyin moved to the US at a young age she embraces her African heritage. The pattern of the backgrounds can be found in the mud cloth of the Bamana weavers made in Mali. Set against the patterns of the cloth the marksof the skin remind me of scarification that one can see at times within certain tribes.

Toyin speaks of her wish to portray her brothers not having to adjust to any environment. She depicts them relaxed and just being themselves. Through formal means, by juxtaposing background and figure in a way that dispels any impression of spatial interaction she effectively conveys the sense that these boys exists independently from their context.

However, this is not the life experienced by either Toyin or her brothers who had to move from Ife, Nigeria to Alabama and had to adjust repeatedly to new situations. She is not choosing to reflect a reality, but more a longing/ fantasy. Perhaps in the process of doing this there is a measure of empowerment that takes place for the artist or even repair who in the process of art making is able to correct a painful history. In other words: Draw her loved ones in a way she would have wanted them to feel.

Toyin in her work challenges preconceived ideas and asks us to reconsider “our perceptions of others and imagine something different.” She speaks of her desire to discourage the viewer from objectifying the black body. “ I ‘m working on some pieces right now of my brothers in nude poses, and they’re not meant to be a spectacle. I ‘m trying to get the viewer to look at people being people. The only way to do that is to work the skin so much that it’s no longer just a flat surface for someone to wash over their ideas – they have to look and dig to find a person.” (Excerpt from an interview of the artist by Justin Allen)

More than anything, this series is an act of love, a reminder of its presence even when all else changes

Interview with Nicholas Hlobo by Diane Frankel

Nicholas Hlobo cuts, tears, punctures and resews varied materials such as paper, black inner tube, satin ribbon, leather, textiles that are rich in associations and creates drawings, sculptural installations and performances where he explores issues of personal identity, such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, origins and colonial history. As Hlobo explains in the following video, he makes the seam, which he highlights by using bright satin ribbon, central to his work by giving it metaphorical significance.  In his drawings he wants to make a mark but instead of using a pen he chooses a sharp object and makes a scar. The action is more violent and the following process of sewing is a process of mending, of repair. Sean O’Toole speaks of the seam as “ the defining metaphor of Hlobo ‘s work, grafting histories and reconciling opposites.”

Hlobo’s drawings are a visual delight: imaginative, intricate and provocative. Increasingly they are gaining a sculptural quality as threads and other materials spill out of the frame onto the wall reaching the floor. His sculptural works often made out of black inner tube with its association to industrialization and urban growth feel more aggressive and invasive yet are tempered by the yielding quality of the rubber material, the softness of the textiles and Hlobo’s general unwillingness to be fully explicit and lay things bare.

Hlobo was born in Cape Town in 1975 and belongs to the Xhosa culture. He tends to title his works in Xhosa. Asked about the reasons of his choice, he responds:

“ It opens up worlds that are closed. It challenges the notion that art making is a purely western tradition and should solely exist within the constraints of the English language.  It challenges the idea that English is the best way to communicate. Most of my work requires curiosity, to look a bit further. The visual language is universal but most work is informed by a personal way of seeing. My work speaks of my place of origin and makes reference to my South African history.”

Nicholas Hlobo is a rising international star. He was included in the 2011 Venice Biennale, was chosen in 2010 by Rolex for the Mentor and Protégé program with Anish Kapoor, and has been included in the Paris Triennale, Tate Modern, and Palazzo Grassi.