Goodman Gallery is pleased to present new work by ruby onyinyechi amanze in her solo exhibition ‘Light Blue Violet’. Over the past decade, amanze has been building an intentional cast of characters and structural elements that populate her drawing practice. Space, architecture and movement are also large thematic building blocks in her practice. Recent exhibitions have seen the artist translate what plays out on the paper surface into the exhibition space. amanze’s 2022 London exhibition ‘DUETS’ was the first crystallisation of this approach, with the works offering a dimensionality and understanding of space that positions the artist as a choreographer. This show in Johannesburg pushes this exploration, further extending the viewing experience. amanze imagines the space in her drawings as rooms which can be physically entered and figures and objects occupy these rooms in compositions that skew and call into question an assumed perspective. Although minor in their individual capacity, the effect of these smaller shifts produce a cumulative disorientation or reorientation. The disruption in the plane of the drawing spills out into how the artworks interact within the exhibition space.
amanze’s art draws inspiration from photography, textiles, architecture and print-making and 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 employs the malleability of space as the primary antagonist. A nameless, self-imagined and 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.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler‘s 1883 exhibition at London’s Fine Art Society is often regarded as the first “white cube” show, with white artworks framed in white and set against a white backdrop. By 1976, Brian O’Doherty criticised the white cube aesthetic as a modernist fixation. This means amanze’s work contributes to an ongoing, non-linear narrative and while it does create a self-imagined, chimeric universe it also pushes up against and exists within what we could call reality, employing visual elements that follow a shifting yet rather insistent lineage. With these considerations in mind, this exhibition’s use of white transcends surface. The intentionality of this artistic choice moves colour from mere aesthetics to a vehicle for strategic artistic propositions and declarations, embodying absence or presence in the space, inviting the viewer to really notice. amanze further invites viewers to engage in “deep seeing,” inspired by composer Pauline Oliveros’ concept of “deep listening”, which encourages active, conscious observation rather than passive viewing.
amanze earned her B.F.A., Summa Cum Laude, from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and her M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art. In 2012-2013, amanze was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. She has exhibited in Lagos, London, Johannesburg, Paris, California and Harlem. Most recently, she completed two-year long residencies at the Queens Museum as part of the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions Program in New York. ‘Light Blue Violet’ opened on the 5th of October and will run until the 16th of November 2024 at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg.
