<h2>INNER WORLDS, OUTER JOURNEYS<br> ABLADE GLOVER AT 90 <br> 4 JULY – 3 AUGUST 2024</h2> <h2>VITAL FORCE<br> 5 – 28 SEPTEMBER 2024</h2> <h2>VITAL FORCE<br> 5 – 28 SEPTEMBER 2024</h2> <h2>INNER WORLDS, OUTER JOURNEYS<br> ABLADE GLOVER AT 90 <br> 4 JULY – 3 AUGUST 2024</h2> <h2>DREAM NO SMALL DREAM: The Story of October Gallery<br>Available from our Book Store, £40 + P&P</h2>304 pages, full colour plates throughout. Edited by Gerard Houghton.<h2>EDDY KAMUANGA ILLUNGA<br>Available from our Book Store, £45.95 + P&P</h2>248 pages, 200 full colour plates throughout. Published by Rizzoli.<h2>ROMUALD HAZOUMÈ at the 60th Venice Biennale<br> 20th April – 24th November, 2024</h2> Photo © Jacopo La Forgia.<h2>ROMUALD HAZOUMÈ at the 60th Venice Biennale<br> 20th April – 24th November, 2024</h2> Photo © Jacopo La Forgia.
 

CURRENT EXHIBITION

ABLADE GLOVER: Inner Worlds, Outer Journeys

4 July – 3 August 2024
Ablade Glover, Market Profile, 2018.
Oil on canvas. 127 x 101 cm.
Ablade Glover, Market Profile, 2019.
Oil on canvas. 152 x 152 cm.
In celebration of the artist’s 90th birthday, October Gallery is delighted to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Professor Ablade Glover. In a career spanning more than seven decades, Ablade Glover’s many honours and distinctions underline his importance as artist, educator and curator both in Ghana and internationally. Not only by his teaching and mentoring, which have inspired generations of artists coming to the forefront today, but also by his continually developing practice as a painter, has Ablade Glover helped shape the current course and future pathways of Ghanaian art.

Glover’s inimitable canvases celebrate, in vivid colours, the richly visual splendours of his native country. Using warm primary pigments, expressive of an intense solar heat, Glover depicts the vibrant scenes and spectacles playing out daily on the shimmering streets of Accra. He portrays the hidden spirit of the place – the energetic market stalls, the lorry parks and the brightly-attired crowds. Selecting the palette knife rather than the brush as his instrument of choice, Glover applies his oils skilfully, in a thick impasto that, when seen close to, reduces the restless Brownian motion of the bustling masses into a riotous wash of gloriously coloured abstraction.

In 1982, Ablade Glover was the first artist from sub-Saharan Africa to exhibit at October Gallery. Since then, the Gallery has devoted ten solo shows to the colourful and always energetic canvases of this acclaimed master of oil-on-canvas painting. Glover’s latest show, Inner Worlds, Outer Journeys, traces an arc of development, which his younger self, setting out on a journey of inner and outer discoveries, might not have imagined he could ever achieve as part of the unfolding tapestry of an accomplished life in art.

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FORTHCOMING EXHIBITION

VITAL FORCE

5 – 28 September 2024
LR Vandy, Resistance, 2024.
Manilla rope, wood and metal 128.6 x 32 x 29 cm.
Golnaz Fathi, When the rain comes we can be thankful, 2021.
Acrylic, ink and spray paint on canvas 170 x 130 cm.
October Gallery presents Vital Force, an exhibition that includes striking works by El Anatsui, Kenji Yoshida, LR Vandy, Romuald Hazoumè, Golnaz Fathi, Jukhee Kwon, Williams S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Govinda Sah ‘Azad and Elisabeth Lalouschek amongst others. Vital Force gives space for the innate energies of each unique artwork to manifest before bringing them together in a powerful drama of luminous interactive forms.

Highlights include Kenji Yoshida’s magnificent large-scale work, La Vie (Life), 1993, which employs an elliptical language of coloured forms rendered in gold and silver leaf. This extraordinary piece marries modernist abstraction with the delicate gilding techniques of Japanese tradition. This large-scale panelled work will be juxtaposed with a shimmering wall-hanging by El Anatsui. Created from recycled bottle-tops, intricately stitched together, the work will be hung in such a way as to allow the viewer to explore the range and composition of colours on both sides of the mesmerising metallic installation.

Romuald Hazoumè will be represented by one of his signature masks. These provocative works, assembled from found objects, operate as impromptu portraits of individuals, highlighting the artist’s astute social commentary. Adopting the ubiquitous plastic petrol cannister as his iconic signature, Hazoumè’s work is deeply rooted in the political and cultural context of Benin and its interactions with the wider globalised world beyond. Taken from her Hulls series, LR Vandy’s Resistance is an impressive large-scale wooden work that incorporates manilla rope tied into knots set delicately into its frame. These knots evoke the clenched fist, a symbolic nod to the Black power salute, the feminist movement of the 80s and the braided African hairstyle of Bantu Knots. Vandy’s use of hulls and knotted rope allude to the complex histories of transatlantic trade, and, more specifically, to the transport of migrants as commodities.

Jukhee Kwon creates her intricate sculptures out of unused and abandoned books. By skilful slicing and cutting, she transforms these tomes into sculptures bursting from the books’ spines, streaming out in cascading waterfalls, to explore ambient surface areas. While Govinda Sah’s latest canvas comprises subtly interwoven layers of acrylic marks and traces. Sah is fascinated by the universes within and beyond our earth-bound vision. Similarly, Iranian artist Golnaz Fathi’s bold gestural work, When the rain comes, we can be thankful, 2021, presents interwoven layers of enigmatic meanings.

Also on display will be Nierica - Caressed By Fire, a vibrant work by Elisabeth Lalouschek painted in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Lost to sight for thirty years, the painting will be shown for the first time since 1990. Finally, ink and spray paint works by artist and author, William S. Burroughs, are exhibited in conversation with longtime collaborator and fellow artist Brion Gysin’s work De la Cité des Arts..., an abstract ink on paper, depicting the artist’s unique perspective from the window from which his studio overlooked the Ile Saint Louis in Paris.

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RECENT EXHIBITIONS

EMERGENT ENERGIES

30 May – 29 June 2024
Matheus Marques Abu, O oceano oferece um reflexo mais íntimo de quem somos do que qualquer espelho (The ocean offers a more intimate reflection of who we are than any mirror), 2024.
Acrylic on canvas. 150 x 150 cm.
Theresa Weber, Stream Of Consciousness, 2024.
Silicone, foam clay, acrylic paste, varnish, beads, acrylic nails, mosaic stones on wood board, 200 x 160 cm.

Emergent Energies presents a selection of innovative artwork by: Theresa Weber, Matheus Marques Abu, Dafe Oboro, Gosette Lubondo, Eyasu Telayneh and Zana Masombuka. Comprising photographic works, paintings and sculpture, the exhibition highlights the vitality that each of these young artists brings to their work.
Theresa Weber's multi-media installations are an absorbing blend of cultural, historical and mythological references that reflect her conceptual approach to the ever-changing nexus of identity. Influenced by the writings of the Caribbean postcolonial theorist and poet, Édouard Glissant, she examines the complexities of cultural reinvention using motifs borrowed from nature. Her practice blurs the boundary between sculpture and performance.

The paintings of Matheus Marques Abu are influenced by his ancestry, spirituality and the daily lives of those of the African diaspora in Brazil. Focusing on the Atlantic Ocean as a site of memory, Marques Abu explores the interwoven colonial and Afro-Atlantic histories, by placing the sea, nature and the Ghanaian Adinkra ideograms as central figures within his work.

Working mainly in photography and film allows artist Dafe Oboro to explore a multifaceted approach to storytelling. Drawing upon fashion motifs and popular culture, Oboro uses sound and imagery to contemplate questions of masculinity, movement across time and space and the socio-political state of contemporary Nigeria.

Emergent Energies includes photographic works by Gosette Lubondo, a rising star of contemporary African photography. Lubondo’s contemplative photographs explore memory, time and heritage.

Eyasu Telayneh creates captivating abstract paintings filled with his reflections on contemporary life in the vibrant cultural hub of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. His passion for mathematics adds further impetus to the colours appearing in these paintings, which balance gestural strokes with geometric lines and forms to create dynamic compositions.

Lastly, photographic works by Zana Masombuka - a.k.a. ‘Ndebele Superhero’ - a South African visual artist will be shown. In her series entitled, 2009: Namba S’khambe, she explores the politics of a ‘seat at the table’ and how capitalism and inequity inform the dynamics of engagement for all institutional paradigms.


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LR VANDY: Twist

18 April – 25 May 2024
LR Vandy, Twist, 2024.
Giclée print on Hahnemühle pearl paper 64 x 42.5 cm
Edition of 8 plus 1 artist's proof
LR Vandy, Dancing in Time: Vogue, 2024.
Sisal rope, wood and metal
40 x 28.5 x 23.5 cm
October Gallery is delighted to present Twist, the second solo exhibition by LR Vandy, which features a new series of sculptures created from a variety of ropes and other materials; one large-scale rope work, several smaller rope sculptures, a collection of photographic prints and further new works from the artist’s signature Hull series. The exhibition follows last year’s display of Vandy’s large-scale installation, Dancing in Time: The Ties That Bind Us, a five-meter-high rope sculpture commissioned for the International Slavery Museum’s Martin Luther King celebrations at Liverpool’s Canning Dock waterfront.

In 2022, Vandy relocated her studio to a site adjacent to the Ropery at Chatham Historic Dock Yard – an establishment which has preserved traditional rope-making, still using original machinery from the 19th century, of which the oldest dates back to 1811. This led the artist to explore the matter and properties of rope, as she began to delve into the material’s historical importance and symbolic implications.

This series of rope sculptures was inspired by Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, ‘Dancing in the streets’, which locates the phenomenon of ‘collective joy’ as central to the origins of dance. Other contributing sources can be found in hunting rituals and the African spirit dances that transformed into carnival masquerades in the African diaspora. The vital, energetic forms are composed by shaping and hand-sewing sections of rope together, before tying off and binding the loose ends with twine or copper wire. Other rope sculptures subtly integrate incongruous found objects: cogs, pipes, washers skipping-rope handles, etc. Vandy’s vivacious curvilinear sculptures challenge the typical representation of the female form –historically subjected to the male gaze – to provide a more positive depiction that associates female abstraction with empowerment.

Alongside these sculptures, a new selection of Vandy’s striking Hull series will be shown, exploring the trade significance of indigo. The artist draws upon traditional talismans, amulets and charms to transform these model boats into ‘masks’ adorned and animated with various materials including rope, fishing floats and feathers. By continuously experimenting with different materials, LR Vandy’s remarkable assemblages, on close examination, animate the field of contemporary sculpture with haunting echoes laden with insight into issues of continuing relevance today.

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