I am black and I am White: Osaretin Ighile
Obama, 2010.
About:
Entanglement I, I am black and I am white, 2011.
Osaretin Ighile’s recent sculpture employs strategies that grasp notions of artworks as conceptual totalities, multivalent narratives crafted from a variety of approaches, not just single images that express big ideas about humanity. His work is informed by a sophisticated discourse on traditional philosophical concepts, a deep understanding of the aesthetic and cultural character of the African continent as well as an invigorating inclination and facility with various materials and methods. By inventively handling his material within a formalist sculptural framework, combined with a highly developed experimental approach to making art, he creates work that is unorthodox, persistently innovative, and ignores boundaries between different cultural heritages and socially constructed constraints.
Oba Ovonram wen of Benin, 2011.
Untitled, 2014.
Osaretin Ighile’s uses mundane materials such as burnt wood, cut-up plastic crates and metal to create work that is evocative of the pomp, pageantry and historical myths surrounding the deposed ruler. He is among a generation of artists who no longer view colonialism as a constant source of trauma, drawing on a profound understanding of his culture, his openness to the world and to diversity, as he re-works art historical tropes for a complex investigation of the mutable meaning of artistic border in a global world. By linking past and present in a visually cohesive context that simultaneously preserve an overall fluency, beauty and humor he encourages us to explore possibilities of how to understand the world, how to contemplate the world and how to express the world. His work has benefited from a growing international awareness of contemporary African art that has advanced so dramatically in recent years, exposing him to greater possibilities for new aesthetic thinking. What often seeps through his work is a playfulness that comes out of the originality of his artistic strategies.
Loss, 2010.
Portrait, Study, 2000.
(quotes from press release Skoto Gallery New York. Skoto represents Ighile)