With four artists, Omenka goes to Cape Town Art Fair

Duke Asidere, Gerry Nnubia, Ndidi Emefiele (Nigerians) and a Cameroonian, Joel Mpah Dooh are four artists whose works go on display from February 26 to March 1, courtesy of Omenka Gallery, at the second edition of the Cape Town Art Fair, V & A Waterfront, South Africa.

  With the exhibition, Omenka strengthens its international exploits for artists of African origin or base. Last year, the gallery took quite a number of Nigerian artists to art fairs in Europe and the Middle East.

  According to Ladun Ogidan at Omenka Gallery, each artist comes into the Cape Town Art Fair with different “primary point of investigation.” For example, Dooh, she notes, “is preoccupied with experimentation and has enjoyed international critical acclaim with his paintings and multi-media works.” The artist, Ogidan explains, is inspired by the tactile reality of his environment though is mostly an inner traveler. He works on paper, canvas, corrugated iron and most recently acrylic sheets. “The Cameroonian also incorporates earth, paints, clay, packaging, wood, and chalk to explore the fragility of individual human identity and how we reinvent ourselves while moving and evolving in the city.”

   For cubist, Asidere, it’s about themes that engage contemporary African politics. “Through visual metaphors, the artist comments on the everyday human drama that surrounds him; political, social, psychological or cultural. Furthermore, he adds an element of surprise to these sketches of human drama by infusing them with irony and humour.”

  Asidere’s broad oeuvre, the gallery says, includes headless or limbless figures and faces of strangely hybrid beings as well as densely populated urban landscapes, accentuated with thick strokes of vivid colour. And in recent times, his work, it has been observed “has turned to car enamel paint, which he applies with a spray gun to produce emotionally charged works that retain figurative subject matter, and at the same time emphasise abstract qualities.”. Among the painter’s high point on canvas is “simplicity of form and expressive line.” 

  For Nnubia’s texture of canvas that “offers critical possibilities for painting,” it also delves into what the gallery describes as “tensions between form and formlessness, vital to the tenets of modernism with his acrylic flow.” The artist’s technique features “skillful manipulation of his medium to a liquid viscous flow often assimilating accidental occurrences and temperature adjustments, depending on the effect sought.”