Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Portals
October 4–November 5, 2016
Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Road
London N1 7RW
Victoria Miro is delighted to present 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. 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. In Akunyili Crosby’s work, doors, windows and screens function as physical, conceptual and emotional points of arrival and departure, while in a broader sense the work itself is a portal through which mutable ideas about transcultural identity flow back and forth.
On initial impression the work appears to focus on interiors or apparently everyday scenes and social gatherings. Many of Akunyili Crosby’s works feature figures—images of family and friends, the artist and her husband—in scenarios derived from familiar domestic experiences: eating, drinking, watching TV. Rarely do they meet the viewer’s gaze but seem bound up in moments of intimacy or reflection that are left open to interpretation. Ambiguities of narrative and gesture are underscored by a second wave of imagery, only truly discernible close-up. Vibrantly patterned areas are created from images derived from Nigerian pop culture and politics, drawn from the artist’s archive of snapshots, magazines and advertisements, or sourced from the internet. Akunyili Crosby applies these to the surface of her work through an acetone transfer technique. It is partly via this labour-intensive process that she addresses the idea of cultural overlap and the complex layering of influences—personal, cultural and political—on people and places.
These are images necessarily complicated in order to counter generalisations about African or diasporic experience. Describing her interiors as “wormholes,” Akunyili Crosby articulates the nuances of post-colonial identity and encourages leaps of time and space, across cultures and continents. Featuring a lone figure in an interior, an unwatched TV and a tea tray set for two, Super Blue Omo, 2016, is a scene of deceptive simplicity whose tilted planes become, on close inspection, an invitation to consider a more complex narrative. While the title refers to a well-known brand of washing powder, with a long-running advertisement that ran on Nigerian television during the artist’s childhood in the 1980s (which can be seen on the TV set in the work), it is also the jumping off point for an extended meditation on chromatic and psychological states of “blueness”—the glow of the room and its atmosphere of introspection.
While the artist’s formative years in Nigeria are a constant source of inspiration, Akunyili Crosby’s grounding in Western art history adds further layers of reference. Her still-lifes are both highly personal and freighted with cultural meaning. The Twain Shall Meet, 2015, is one of a number of works that incorporates an image of the table owned by the artist’s grandmother, who appears in a framed portrait. Laden with familial and other possessions it also plays host to a range of visual cues about geographical and changing socio-economic circumstances. A recurring motif is the kerosene lamp. Ubiquitous in rural areas of Nigeria, where electricity supplies are at best unreliable, it shares space with plastic containers used for storing, cooking and serving food. Here, ideas of home, hospitality and generosity mingle with thoughts about cultural inheritance in a broader sense.
Akunyili Crosby (b. 1983, Enugu, Nigeria) lives in Los Angeles. Awards include: Foreign Policy’s Leading 100 Global Thinkers of 2015; the Next Generation Prize; New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015; Prix Canson Prize, 2016; the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, 2015; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s James Dicke Contemporary Art Prize, 2014. Recent exhibitions include: I Refuse to be Invisible, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach (2016); The Beautyful Ones, Art + Practice, Los Angeles (2015); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015). Collections include: Yale University Art Gallery, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Nasher Museum of Art, Tate Modern, The Norton Museum of Art, Zeitz MOCAA, LACMA, MoMA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
The artist is in conversation with Zoe Whitley at Tate Modern, Starr Cinema, Thursday, September 29, 7–8.30pm.
