Modernism in mid-20th-century drawings from Nigeria: Above, Uche Okeke’s “Design for Iron Work I,” from 1959; and “Okpaladike and his Obu,” from 1961. Courtesy of the artist and Skoto Gallery
Article written by Holland Cotter
Histories
of Modernism are constantly changing as scholars come to realize its
global breadth and local particularities. The marketplace is slower on
the uptake. Although New York has a few galleries specializing in
early-to-mid-20th-century Asian work, Skoto Gallery in Chelsea remains,
more than two decades after it opened, the sole full-time outlet for
comparable work from Africa. And it gives us some
Modernism-merging-into-contemporary basics in a thumbnail survey of
works on paper by the influential West African artist Uche Okeke.
Born
in Nigeria in 1933, Mr. Okeke was, in the 1950s, a founding member of
the Zaria Art Society, a group of academically trained experimental
artists who joined Western mediums — oil paint, pastel, pen and ink —
and African content. That content, for Mr. Okeke, included a distinctive
type of drawing associated with the Igbo people of southern Nigeria.
While many of his colleagues emigrated to Europe and the United States,
he has spent almost all of his career in Africa, teaching until the late
1980s at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka. The result is art that,
without looking specifically ethnic, is thoroughly and consciously
African in its references.
It
is also inventively restless. In the work at Skoto, much of it
consisting of notebook studies beginning in 1958, when he was in art
school, Mr. Okeke moves from fleet watercolor landscape sketches, to ink
drawings of fantastic creatures derived from folklore, to portraits
that incorporate elements of ancient Nigerian Nok sculpture.
And interspersed throughout are drawings of curved and jagged abstract
patterns that have sources in Igbo body painting and would have thrilled
the jazz dancer in Mondrian. Put any of these modest-size drawings in a
gallery at the Museum of Modern Art (will we ever see this?) with
comparably scaled Western work, and you’ll find both that they fit right
in, and that they don’t, which is precisely the tension that makes
them, and the larger Modernism, so interesting.
Skoto Gallery
529 West 20th Street, Chelsea
Through Feb. 21
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