Cheikhou Bâ: Migrations: 25th May 2017 to 6th July 2017, 50Golborne Gallery, London
Fly my Flag, 2016.
About:
50 GOLBORNE is delighted to announce the first solo show by Cheikhou Ba in the UK: Migrations.
Born and based in Dakar, Senegal, Cheikhou Ba trained at the Dakar Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts before studying ceramics at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD). His body of works includes ceramics, paintings, mixed media installations and sculpture, and focus on questions of ontology and ethics in the current socio-political global context.
In this exhibition, Cheikhou Ba examines the notion of Migrations through his trademark small mixed-media black sculptures and a new series of oil on canvas. Part birds, part humans and part objects, these works question the nature of movement of humans on a large scale, taken within the wider prism of movement of animals and matter.
Au Commencement, 2016.
Of course, Ba’s artworks are to be taken on the recent context of political to recent and current issues of immigrations due to conflicts in Middle East and on- going economic emigration from poorer nations to richer ones that have been more and more in the political realm of Europe, the US but also in some countries in Africa such as South Africa.
The ‘Migrations’ paintings are a collage of several panels making one piece that forms what Ba terms uni-polyptychs. The multiple parts of the painting not only represent elemental juxtaposing or opposing but also are to be read as a whole, symbolic of the contemporary urban fabric melding of the disparate into a cohesive narrative.
Migration III, 2016.
Ba’s also cites Julia Kristeva’s definition of the Abject as the very notion of undifferentiating between object and subject, human and animal as an influence in his work. In his sculptures he uses the visual language of dark fantasy popular film infusing their seriousness with caustic humour. He has closely studied Philip Guston as well as George Condo: seductive bright colours and balloon shapes might be celebrating the joy of movement, but the details of a hallucinating eyeball, or a swiftly sketched rat muzzle occur to divulge all is more complex than initially revealed.
Matete mamaison, 2016.
Exploring ‘what it is to be an African’ is deeply rooted in Senegalese’ s unique cultural heritage shaped by Leopold Senghor – a poet who went on to become a newly independent Senegal’s first head of state – and his theories on Negritude that hypothesizes a shared spiritual essence amongst members of the same race. Inspired by Senghor’s writing, Cheikhou Ba extends the line of questioning to contemplate: ‘what is it to be human’.
Some of the elements listed by Senghor as composing the ‘ontology of Negritude’ inform recurrent motifs in Ba’s work, namely the motif of hybridity: man as animal and matter together; both virile and female; and not contradictory – as in the Western opposition of mind and body – but complementary. Man is not an immobile entity but one that is constantly moving.
Moi j’ai pas fait un reve, 2016.
Cheikhou Bâ, was selected twice for the Dakar Biennale. He has most recently exhibited in Bilbao, Neuchatel, Dubai and London. He will be showing in a group show in May entitled “Light, Shadow” that will be held at the Opera House in Cairo and in a solo show at 50 Golborne, London from May 23rd 2017. His work was exhibited also at 1:54 Art Fair London, Art Dubai and Art Paris.