ruby onyinyechi amanze

amanze’s creative practices and processes focus on producing mixed media, paper-based drawings and works. Her art draws inspiration from photography, textiles, architecture and print-making.

amanze’s practice builds around questions of how to create drawings that maintain paper’s essence of weightlessness. The large-scaled and multi-dimensional drawings are part of an ongoing, yet non-linear narrative that employ the malleability of space as the primary antagonist.

A nameless, self-imagined, chimeric universe has simultaneously been positioned between nowhere and everywhere. Using a limited palette of visual elements, including ada the Alien, windows and birds, amanze’s drawings create a non-narrative and expansive world. The construction of this world is largely centered around an interest in the spatial negotiations found in the three dimensional practices of dance, architecture and design.

Leonardo Drew

Drew is known for creating wall-based abstract sculptural works that play on a tension between order and chaos. The artist typically uses manipulated organic materials to create richly detailed works – seemingly bursting from the walls – which resemble densely populated cities or urban wastelands and evoke the mutability of the natural world. Materials include wood, cardboard, paint, paper, plastic, rope, string and tree trunks.

Exemplary works of Drew’s approach can be found in Number 351. The elongated silhouette has the monumentality of a skyscraper, as well as the semblance of an ancient tablet. Made in Drew’s signature technique, featuring neatly stacked pieces of cut lumber in a dynamic, gridded sculptural relief, it is finished with a matte black wash with a white spinal column in the centre of each panel, which emphasizes vertical rhythm. The white element amidst the black is like a code or a written language – like Braille, a micro-text to decipher. But it is also like a macro view of a densely built city. Drew says: “I think of it as making chaos legible.”

Nicholas Hlobo

Hlobo is known for creating hybrid objects, intricately weaving ribbon and leather into crisply primed canvas alongside wood and rubber detritus. Each material holds charged associations with cultural, gendered, sexual and national identity, creating a complex visual narrative that references ideas around postapartheid nationhood and bodily healing.

Using the metaphor of himself as a surgeon, Hlobo treats the canvas like a physical being, ready to be cut open and sewn up at his discretion. For this latest series, Hlobo embraces acrylic paint as a primary material in his toolbox, continuing to sculpt the canvas with multicoloured stitching but alongside bold streaks of paint.

Guided by the subconscious, Hlobo allows the kaleidoscopic gradients of paint to conjure abstract figurative renderings on the canvas. His tactile manipulation of the canvas itself produces protruding structural forms suggestive of topographical models. In between these structures are vibrant, energetic, gestural strokes of paint that contrast with the meticulously woven ribbon.

Drawing for Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot (Tondo IV) is premised on William Kentridge’s acclaimed production The Head & the Load, featuring key World War I and African liberation figures.

In this instance, Tondo IV was drawn as part of Kentridge’s forthcoming television series, Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot, for an episode that focuses on the making of The Head & the Load. Notable figures in the drawing include Patrice Lumumba, independence leader and first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who steered the transition from the colonial Belgian Congo to the DRC. Lumumba was assassinated within a year of becoming prime minister. A young Leopold Senghor, the poet and cultural theorist who was the founder of the Senegalese Democratic Bloc party and became the first president of liberated Senegal in 1960. Frantz Fanon, the French West Indian political philosopher and psychiatrist from Martinique whose seminal text The Wretched of the Earth established and continues to inspire decolonial thought

Cinthia SIfa Mulanga

Mulanga’s paintings present multiple characters who grapple with idealised and racialised ideas around female expression while attempting to reach beyond imposed constructs and self-define. The portrayal of plant life signifies an engagement with the wider world that projects these ideas.

These works reflect the artist’s personal journey of becoming:

The moments I create in domestic spaces are dialogues between perceived beauty standards, and stereotypes which function to both challenge and embrace Black women. The Barbie doll, a primary inspiration in my work, is used with other feminine objects or symbols with associations to Black women, representing thoughts, misconceptions, perceptions and emotions. These spaces allow me to create conversations and interrogate notions of beauty

Misheck Masamvu

Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, Misheck Masamvu’s works allow him to address the past while searching for a way of being in the world. His layered painted surfaces and brushstrokes, which are almost visceral, exist as remnants of the physical act of painting giving the sense that multiple temporalities have been included in one picture plane. Beneath the surface of a painted image, an infinity of others exist. Through abstraction, Masamvu’s figures appear in the midst of metamorphosis, absorbed by teeming landscapes.

Masamvu created these paintings during the global lockdowns. Forced immobility created internal conflicts which are expressed in the works. The canvasses appear to convulse, as if caught in the act of mutation. This act of synchronous change and entanglement is evident through the extensive use of line and weaving together of brilliant colour. The result is images that are not immediately apparent, rather cloaked in layers of camouflage that invite the viewer to drum out images in their own mind. The lack of exacting definition from Masamvu’s expressive mark making establishes an honest conversation between the artist and the viewer, an invitation to experience his shifting visual lexicon and a prompt to delve into Masamvu’s own personal layers of history. Collectively, this pushes the viewer to become conscious of their own conflicts.

Ravelle Pillay

As a descendant of labourers who were transported to the former British colony of Natal as part of a larger system of Indian indenture, Pillay’s work is closely informed by legacies of colonialism, and their reverberations in the present. Pillay uses painting and drawing as a material means through which to explore how colonial legacies have found form in personal and collective memory, the natural world, and in the idea of haunting.

Pillay’s borrowed archive of her grandmother’s photo albums provides a foundation to the subject matter of her paintings and into understanding her family’s history within a larger narrative: the displacement of indentured migrants, the still-present spectres of Apartheid, and of place and belonging. As Pillay writes, “I started to think more about life-making inside of these systems, how lives were made ‘in spite of’ and ‘in defiance’.”

Yinka Shonibare CBE RA

A series of vibrantly coloured, hand-stitched quilts illustrate African artefacts which formed part of the private collections of influential modernist artists such as Matisse and Derain. Classical European sculptures of goddesses drawn from Greek and Roman mythology are hand-painted with Shonibare’s signature Dutch wax batik patterns, their heads replaced with replicas of African masks complimentary to the figure’s associated myths. Each mask has been drawn from a prominent twentieth century artist’s collection.

Naama Tsabar

Tsabar’s Works On Felt series appear as coloured geometric objects mounted on walls, these works see the artist employ felt, carbon fiber, piano strings and guitar tuning pegs to create tactile sculptures that visually draw on the minimalist tradition whilst simultaneously inviting viewer interaction. Works On Felt can be activated by viewers, the sounds amplified into the exhibition space through a guitar amplifier next to the felt form. When plucked or touched the sound waves travel through a hybrid material of felt embedded with carbon fiber. The material looks like felt, however, added carbon holds the tension of the string and allows sound to travel through the work. The shape of the work corresponds to the pitch of the string. The works are formed when the string is inserted; a larger curve presents a higher pitch, giving each work both an individual form and note.

Michal Worke

Worke sees her role as a visual commentator on the plight of the migrant Ethiopian community. Like migrant communities across Europe and America, the experience for many is about the struggle to survive and to be accepted in society. Worke combines a distinct figurative style - deliberately naive and brightly coloured - with feminist sensibilities, exploring identity and, at times, directly referencing the practice of the late Portuguese-British artist Paula Rego. The artist creates autobiographical paintings, combining self-portraits with portraits of her family and community.