On Thursday evening, David Krut Projects opened its spring season with Torn Apart, a solo show from Nigerian sculptor Nnenna Okore. The show runs through June 4 and features large-scale multimedia pieces composed in burlap, recycled newspaper, wire, and other materials. The artist was on-hand at the opening and took a moment to chat with NearSay.
Okore said her work seeks to return to nature; she explores how manufactured materials like burlap and newsprint can be broken down and reworked to arrive at a uniquely organic form. She literally layers history and memory into her pieces using old newspapers, which she shreds to a pulp and then recomposes in colorful sculptural narratives.
The gallery's press release describes Okore's work as "hands on, repetitive, and laborious," and the artist said she prefers burlap as a base as it is "fibrous and easily fragmentable," and hopes to show that "even in that [remote] past, a lot can be vivid."
Her creations are at once solidly earthen and delightfully airy, and pay "homage to her country's foragers and peddlers."
On Thursday, the artist told NearSay she has always been "enamored by how things can be whole and then break down and break down, and breakdown and breakdown." This echoes other great Nigerian works, which often examine themes of destruction and redemption, like Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's critically acclaimed 2003 debut, Purple Hibiscus.
Okore left Nigeria in 2002 to pursue a Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Iowa. She now lives full-time in Chicago, where she is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Art Department at Chicago's North Park University.
For additional photos, click here. For more information, contact David Krut Projects at info@davidkrut.com.
David Krut Projects: 526 W. 26th St. #816, between 10th & 11th Aves.
