Inspired by her recent residency at The V&A, London, Marcia Kure continues to embrace abstraction and figuration through sculpture, watercolor and collage. Making a formal and ideological transition within the work, Kure pushes towards abstraction as a means of negotiating the hyper-realism of modern modes of communication and dissemination. In processing current events from natural to social disasters she addresses abstraction of the physical body through a variety of mediums that grapple with laws of nature and culture.
This form of figurative abstraction is seen explicitly in Kure’s Warrior I & II, which are accretions of fabric puzzled together on dress forms, formal arrangements that might mimic or behave like a body; an aesthetic Frankenstein or the work of a hapless haberdasher. This broken or disintegrated body speaks to disappearance, fragments, memories, or simply in accordance with nature an accumulation of atoms that make up a body. In her sculpture Kure has often employed bits of kitsch or commodified cuteness, these manufactured icons noted in The Charm of The Unfamiliar series, are found and fabricated. Decidedly abstract or abject bodies, the fetish objects or icons exist in a simulacrum-world, acting as surrogates, they practice hope in a hopeless world.
Kure’s collage series, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, discusses discord head-on. The images are of a desperate place, one of confusion and disharmony. For Kure they mine a deep-rooted archive of unresolved issues. Yet in these watercolors memory and longing replace the absence of the body and the challenge becomes one of technique. White paint is applied on white paper, both extracting the image from the background and leaving a ghostly presence.
For Kure the powerlessness she feels regarding issues of political and social injustice are mitigated through the work, a visible struggle between beauty and chaos, the mind and the body. Descartes’ claim, “I think therefore I am” is turned on its head. Constantly negotiating oppositions and extremes, Kure creates juxtapositions to find balance if not resolution through abstraction.
Born in Nigeria, Marcia Kure’s work has appeared in museum and gallery exhibitions in Africa, Canada, Europe, Japan, United Arab Emirates and the United States. Most recently featured at the Dakar Biennale, Senegal; The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; and in the Paris Triennial at Palais de Tokyo. Her work will be exhibited next at WIELS Contemporary Art Center, Brussels in “Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Work of African Women Artists”.
Reviews have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Observer, Time Out, Frieze, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, African Arts and Artforum among others.
The Gallery will publish a catalogue with an original text by Marcia Kure on the occasion of the exhibition.
