ruby onyinyechi amanze / there are even moonbeams we can unfold / 2018
Goodman Gallery Cape Town 19 May – 16 June 2018
there are even moonbeams we can unfold builds on ruby onyinyechi amanze’s first exhibition with Goodman Gallery, SALT WATER. Intended as an exhibition trilogy, this second iteration of the body of work adapts its title from a poem by André Breton that speaks to the poetic fluidity of space. The exhibition largely consists of new work, as well as several works on paper produced during a 2016/17 residency at The Drawing Centre in New York.
In her drawings, amanze invites viewers into her ongoing construction of an expansive and timeless alternate world inhabited by a cohort of beings who move through it freely. These beings exist rather than perform, embracing the mundane, the non-specific and the fluid as ultimate freedoms. In narratives typically prescribed to non-European artists, the appearance of human or pseudo-human forms leans heavily on identity as its raison d’être. amanze instead advocates for the imagined construct of space and the nuance of characters that can be read primarily as form and shape. amanze’s characters – ada, audre, merman and others – relate intimately to one another in that regard: shapes that, despite appearing flat, are somehow activated to move, dive and swim in their stillness.
Artworks
About
ruby onyinyechi amanze
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; ‘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.
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