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. The Johannesburg show pushes this exploration, further extending the viewing experience.
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/reorientation.
The disruption in the plane of the drawing spills out into how the artworks interact within the exhibition space.
The characters within the artist’s work have devolved over time, moving from personas with stories and personal connection to amanze, to objects or puzzle pieces. This softening, almost flattening of these figures enables them to morph in their form, to manifest in differing materials - graphite, ink, photo transfers - or even disappear entirely.
The bodies they inhabit are also able to exist as form, as opposed to an attachment to the body as identity. The show also includes new iterations of a relatively new element; the swimming pool.
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This can be seen in the site-specific work ‘Infinite Deep Blue, contained [POOL]’ which is made according to the gallery wall dimensions.
Viewers are encouraged to engage in deep seeing, modelled after the sonic practice of deep listening; a phrase coined by late experimental composer and teacher, Pauline Oliveros. The objective is not just to look [a biological ability and action, that at times, is passive], but to see [to consciously notice and become aware through your eyes].
Artist Bio
ruby onyinyechi amanze (b.1982, Port-Harcourt, Nigeria) is a Brooklyn-based artist of Nigerian descent and British upbringing whose creative practices and processes focus on producing mixed media, paper-based drawings and works. Her art draws inspiration from photography, textiles, architecture and printmaking.
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.
amanze's practice builds around questions of how to create drawings that maintain paper's essence of weightlessness. The large-scaled and multidimensional 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.
Most recently, amanze completed two-year long residencies at the Queens Museum and as part of the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions Program, both in New York. She has exhibited her work internationally in Lagos, London, Johannesburg and Paris, and nationally at the California African American Museum, the Drawing Center and the Studio Museum of Harlem. In October 2024, she presented a solo exhibition titled 'Light Blue Violet' at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg. Continuing her research on inventing and manipulating spaces, her playful configurations occur both within the two-dimensional drawing plane and into a three-dimensional presentation and experience.
Selected group exhibitions: 'Follow the North Star: Freedom in the Age of Mobility', International African American Museum, Charleston, SC (2024); 'A Superlative Palette: Contemporary Black Women Artists,' Curated by Dexter Wimberly, Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, Charlotte, NC (2024); 'A Slice through the World: Contemporary Artists’ Drawing,' The Drawing Room and Modern Art Oxford, London, United Kingdom (2018); 'Affective Affinities,' 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2018); 'Regarding the Figure,' Studio Museum of Harlem, New York, NY(2017); 'The Ease of Fiction,' Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA (2017); 'the silences between,' Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa (2017); 'Drawing Biennial,' The Drawing Room, London, United Kingdom (2017); 'Where Do We Stand?: Two Years of Drawing with Open Sessions,' The Drawing Center, New York, NY (2017).
Collections include: CSS Bard College Hessel Museum; Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt, Germany; National Museum of African Art Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; The Microsoft Art Collection, Redmond, Washington; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY.
amanze lives and works between Philadelphia and Brooklyn, but calls multiple places home.
