On 6 September, 2022, you are invited to the exhibition Marcia Kure: Reticulation at Susan Inglett Gallery, New York. I am excited to see this show! Her use of various media to convey a sense of the linear, gestural, bringing fresh interpretations of that key principle in traditional Uli art!
We were undergraduate Fine and Applied Arts students at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Marcia Wok Kure was 2 years ahead of me. I admired how she kept on revising every idea that came, drawing variations of each work as they came. Marcia has kept up investigating lines and building new interpretations that startle and delight.
For Marcia, the line moves in space in an unceasing gyre, in spasms. Thus, the line appears everywhere in our daily lives. Marcia and I have had some conversations about this fascination with lines. Here is the announcement by the gallery about the show:
Susan Inglett Gallery is pleased to present new work by Marcia Kure in her fourth solo exhibition with the gallery on view from 6 September 2022 through 15 October 2022. The artist will be present on Tuesday, 6 September from 6 to 8 PM.Following her commissioned site-specific installation NETWORK, currently on view at the Menil Drawing Institute, and The Amina Project, commissioned for the group exhibition PROCESS, at Alexander McQueen London, Marcia Kure continues to explore the complex histories of trade and migration through drawing, sculpture, and collage. A formal synthesis of these recent projects, this exhibition represents an expansion of Kure’s established oeuvre and a deeper consideration of past, present, and emerging systems of power. Through abstraction, Kure asks how visible and invisible structures can be dissolved into line.Reticulation investigates our shared responsibility in perpetuating networks of migration and exchange. Kure uses line as mark, metaphor, memory, and systems tracker. Using paper and canvas soaked and marked with natural pigment—kola nut, indigo, and charcoal—the artist places pressure on the material components of her drawings as commodities that map the movement of bodies throughout time. Kure’s drawings reference the curvilinear shape of the Uli line, a Nigerian design motif traditionally drawn on bodies. Treating the paper or canvas as skin, these marks become a site of remembrance, holding within them histories of colonization and exploitation.A series of grid paintings on paper underscores the artist’s relationship with nature, yet another system of exchange. In a painstaking process, Kure invites the labor of seasons and the passage of time to partake in the creation of her works; cluster-like images, dotted planes, and geometric patterns trace the outcome of this collaboration.In her collage series, Kure combines source material from her studio, pulling images from Oprah Winfrey’s book, Journey to the Beloved, as well as beauty and fashion magazines to create bodies where histories of colonial subjugation and standards of beauty collide. Kure evokes the work of early Dadaist photomontage, utilizing mass-produced imagery and ethnographic renderings to discuss global capitalism. These seemingly unconnected parts merge to represent a network of entanglement, implicating us all in the structures of movement and power.Marcia Kure (b. 1970) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores post-colonial existentialist ideas and identities. Based in both Nigeria and the United States, Kure employs a range of material strategies to address historical, existing, and potential systems of power. Kure’s work has been seen recently at the Menil Drawing Institute, Houston; Alexander McQueen, London; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, and the Wanås Konst Sculpture Park, Knislinge. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the British Museum, London; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC, among others.NETWORK at the Menil Drawing Institute will be on display through 22 September 2022.MARCIA KURE will be on view at the gallery located at 522 West 24 Street Tuesday to Saturday 10 AM to 6 PM. For additional information, please contact Susan Inglett Gallery at 212 647 9111 or info@inglettgallery.com.
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