Goodman Gallery presents the latest series of works on paper by ruby onyinyechi amanze, marking the US-based artist’s first exhibition in London in five years as well as the first physical presentation of her newest works following an OVR launch earlier this year.
amanze completed these paired down drawings during the lockdown period in the US earlier this year. After working for seven years with an ongoing host of characters and elements, amanze has redefined her focus in the following ways:
Textured emptiness: an elevated attention to paper and surface. Expanding upon her affinity for paper and process, amanze continues to play with the question of how to make structural drawings, one element of which, is giving weight to paper while maintaining its inherent properties. This body of work continues that research by layering multiple sheets of paper to create a single drawing, as well as coating the paper’s surface with a palette knife and a combination of mediums, acrylics and varnishes.
An edited cohort of characters. The world amanze creates is a complex spatial negotiation between the paper, surface and a newly edited cohort namely: ada, audre (formerly ada the Alien and audre the Leopard), Bird and the inanimate characters -Swimming Pool, Moped, Window and Other Architectural References. amanze considers the configurations they arrive at to be non-narrative, fuelled instead by an interest in play, dance, magic and design.
According to amanze, “for this show, i wanted to introduce all of the parts. in clean and direct ways. as in, here is a dancer. here is a pool. here is a swimmer. here are some bikes. there’s no story. there never really was. now the importance of the space - the geometry, the poetry - can really be seen. my drawings have been about space for a long time now, but it feels like now they can breathe and not be fogged up by suggestions of narrative. my process is about moving things around. sampling, building, chopping, inventing, mashing together...”
Artworks
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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.
