The Armory Show, the International Exhibition of Modern Art, unfurls its canvas this year from September 6 to 8, 2024. As we previously reported, galleries rooted in affinity with Africa will showcase their artistry at the fair. To guide your exploration, we've curated a list of these exceptional African galleries and their exhibits.
SMAC Gallery | Booth S4
SMAC Gallery unveils "Unknown Lover," Kate Gottgens' latest creation. Gottgens reimagines photographic tropes like 'the pin-up' and everyday snapshots, infusing familiar scenes of leisure and adult play with an enigmatic aura of ironic retrospection. Embracing kitschy poses and a confectionery palette, Gottgens conjures the illusory lover with both intimacy and wit. Her work probes themes of beauty, sexuality, and the fluid gaze, capturing how inner impulses manifest in provocative bodily gestures under the sun's revealing rays.
2. kó | Booth P27
Kó presents a dual artist showcase featuring Na Chainkua Reindorf and Ato Ribeiro. Ribeiro's wood assemblages interweave his West African heritage with his American identity, transforming discarded materials into intricate geometric patterns that echo traditional West African weaving and African American quilting.
Reindorf, a multidisciplinary artist, crafts elaborate narratives of a fictional female masquerade society through paintings, tapestries, and installations. Her mixed-media works incorporate diverse materials such as acrylic gouache, paper fabric, silk, embroidery thread, raffia, and rattan, with narrative scenes framed against bold colours and textures, reimagining the predominantly masculine West African masquerade traditions to explore female empowerment and self-expression.
3. WHATIFTHEWORLD | Booth F7
WHATIFTHEWORLD showcases Chris Soal's latest works, specially created for the fair's Focus section, curated by Robyn Farrell. Soal's creations challenge perceptions of value through mundane objects like toothpicks and bottle caps, combined with industrial materials. His intuitive approach transforms the familiar into the uncanny, reflecting his experiences growing up in Johannesburg. Soal's pieces offer a form of social abstraction, inviting viewers to reconsider their spatial awareness and societal assumptions.
4. Southern Guild | Booth 109
Bringing together those working in figurative and abstract modes, Southern Guild’s booth will feature presentations of two-and three-dimensional works including paintings by Manyaku Mashilo (South Africa), Kamyar Bineshtarigh (Iran/South Africa) and Mmangaliso Nzuza (South Africa); a pair of elliptical ceramic totems by Zizipho Poswa (South Africa); and a large bronze sculpture by Dominique Zinkpè (Benin).
Each artist's unique visual language invites viewers to engage in an explorative journey through themes of language, lineage, resistance, and release. Many of these artists share a common interest in re-envisioning agency in terms of self-representation. Their work offers limitless, liminal spaces to reimagine the past, present, and future, encouraging viewers to travel into expansive definitions of self.
Manyaku Mashilo's "Back to The Source Again" triptych depicts robed pilgrims converging in an abstracted landscape, exploring elements of her upbringing and socio-political engagement. Zizipho Poswa's ceramic sculptures from the "Umthwalo" series honour women's daily labours in rural Eastern Cape and elevate the traditional practice of carrying heavy items on their heads.
Kamyar Bineshtarigh's abstract paintings explore language as a tool for political resistance, with his work "Intifada II" referencing rebellion and communal shedding. Mmangaliso Nzuza's allegorical oil paintings depict figures finding ease and hope in pastoral settings, experimenting with composition and the human figure. Dominique Zinkpè's large-scale sculpture is an assemblage of hand-carved wooden statuettes inspired by the Yoruba tradition of Ibéji dolls, representing a magical realm and the uniqueness of every individual.
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