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© Chika Okeke
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Nigerian painter Marcia Kure’s works — inspired by African cave paintings, woven and printed textiles, bodypainting and a background in which she was exposed to a wide variety of intra-Nigerian cultures and influences — often deal with issues of gender and identity. Kure’s work has been profoundly informed by uli, a painting and drawing tradition practiced by the Igbo women of eastern Nigeria that employs simple forms and minimal use of color. The spare, anthropomorphic forms in her series of works on paper (‘cave paintings,’ whose earth tones are rendered in kolanut pigment and watercolor) exude displacement, strength and liberation, while her abstracted textile paintings capture a rhythmic, multilayered quality perhaps inspired by the complex color arrangements in traditional kente fabrics, which Kure has often cited as a major inspiration in terms of expressing multiculturalism and transcontinental migration.
The work, as a whole, is possibly best explained with the opening lines of Kure’s artist statement:
cloth. texture. connection. disconnection.
unveil. deconstruct. rip apart. rearrange.
heritage. history. myth. |
