23/03/20
Monday, 23 March 2020
Interview with Oluwole Omofemi
23/03/20
Interview: Oluwole Omofemi
Oluwole Omofemi: The Way We Were
Signature African Art, London
Interview: Oluwole Omofemi
Oluwole Omofemi: The Way We Were
Signature African Art, London
12 March – 16 April 2020
Oluwole Omofemi (b1988, Ibadan, Nigeria) always wanted to be an artist, despite opposition from his family. As a child, he learned about the civil rights movement and the natural hair movement of the late 60s and early 70s from his grandfather, who, at the time, sported an afro. Omofemi now uses hair in his paintings as a metaphor for freedom and power, and as a symbol of identity. Some of his series use the more muted palette of the old masters, showing how entrenched identity and culture are in a person’s belief system; others use a brighter, pop art palette, portraying energy and strength and looking to the future. Whatever the style, he considers his work to be African at heart.
One work in particular stands out from the others on display – In Her (2019), depicting a bald woman set against a bright, almost street art-style background, covered in words such as hope, love, aspiration and queen. This piece is dedicated to Omofemi’s grandmother, who died of cancer, as well as to raising awareness of the disease, and showing that a cancer diagnosis is not necessarily the end of everything: there is always hope. Other works are dedicated to his mother, through the use of floral patterns. In general, Omofemi sees women as close to God, in their ability to love, accept and forgive. This is why the majority of his subjects – and all of those in this exhibition – are female.
I spoke to Omofemi just before the opening of his first exhibition in London, at Signature African Art’s new Mayfair venue.
Watch the interview here
Monday, 2 March 2020
Review of Hedda Sterne at Victoria Miro Mayfair
02/03/20
Hedda Sterne
Victoria Miro Mayfair, London
29 January – 21 March 2020
Hedda Sterne. “The only female at [the] birth of abstract expressionism.” Friends and neighbours with gallerist Peggy Guggenheim and in the stable of art dealer Betty Parsons. A “great-artist”.
Born Hedwig Lindenberg on 4 August 1910, in Bucharest, Romania, Sterne lived to the grand age of 100, dying in New York City in 2011. She knew she wanted to be an artist from the age of five or six. “I always loved Leonardo,” she told Sarah Boxer, for the New York Review of Books, shortly before she died. “Artists were always referred to as great artists. I thought that’s what the profession was. One word: great-artist. There wasn’t one moment in my life when I thought I wanted to be anything else.” And so that is what she became. She began to make a name for herself in Romania, but it was after arriving in New York in 1941, fleeing Nazi-occupied Bucharest, that things really began to happen. Having married and separated from a man named Fritz Stern, she adopted his surname, adding an “e”, maintaining this moniker, despite her marriage to fellow Romanian artist Saul Steinberg, three years later.
Sterne fell in love with America and painted its modernity from every angle: “The American kitchen, the American bathroom, the American street, you know, its horizontals and verticals, its points and lines. New York was a total delight, a paradise.” In 1950, she was photographed by Nina Leen, along with 14 other artist-signatories – including Willem De Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still – of an open letter to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, protesting against the museum’s aesthetically conservative group-exhibition juries. The photograph, of which Sterne later said, “I am known more for that darn photo than for 80 years of work,” describing herself as the “feather on top”, was subtitled “Irascible Group of Advanced Artists” and published on the cover of Time-Life magazine on 15 January 1951. Being the only female in the picture garnered Sterne much attention – positive and negative. Lumped together with the abstract expressionists, partly because of her gallerist and dealer, and largely because of this photograph, Sterne always maintained she was not one of the group. “I was not an abstract expressionist. Nor was I an Irascible,” she told Boxer, and, as critic Grace Glueck wrote in 2006: “She has maintained a stubborn independence from styles and trends, including surrealism and abstract expressionism … Although she never developed a signature style, Ms Sterne’s explorations have produced a small universe of evocative images.”
Read my full review here
Sunday, 1 March 2020
Interview with Carmen Neely
01/03/20
Interview with Carmen Neely
Carmen Neely (b1987, Charlotte, North Carolina) makes abstract, expressionistic paintings that translate poignant memories and experiences into gestures on canvas. In turn, these gestures frequently take on a life of their own, being sculpted into 3D forms, photographed and catalogued, and often, like so many other objects and imagined entities in the artist’s life, taking on names and unique personalities. Neely is a collector: of memories, of objects, of paraphernalia, of phrases. All of these things make their way on to and into her canvases, pushing the boundaries of painting, exploring its sense of timeless self-reflection, and ensuring there is a pure and open honesty in her own self-reflective work.
Studio International spoke to Neely by Skype about her practice, the role of collecting and (re)creating characters and identities, and how to be serious about one’s play.
Read the full interview here