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GALLERIES: Simply Red was the call and eager the response

Thursday June 25 2020
juju

‘Juju’ by April Kamunde is a striking portrait with the hair and passages of her shawl particularly well handled. PHOTO | FRANK WHALLEY

By FRANK WHALLEY

Picasso had his Blue Period, soon followed by Rose and since then single colour painting has become part of many artists’ repertoire.

Now the theme has been broadened and to celebrate Kenya’s part-easing of lockdown we are invited to an exhibition based on a single colour, red.

Not monochrome works, but any painting containing even a touch of red filled the bill for the show, Red, at the One Off gallery; both fashionably online (by the force of circumstance if not desire) and happily, physically on the walls as well.

Selection was by open call and artists with an eclectic mix of styles and abilities responded; more than 30 of them offering 65 works in the gallery plus more on line, including some by guest artists from Rwanda, Madagascar, Nigeria and the UK.

This enthusiastic response encouraged curator Carol Lees to relax the gallery’s formal standards a little to create space for a few lesser known and emerging painters.

So, with normal rules like normal life suspended, painters who usually would not get a look in there are clamouring for attention.

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And just as lockdown produced some surprising benefits (lower pollution levels, more exercise, some couples discovering they actually like each other, plus a return to such pleasures as chess and Scrabble) so some of these relatively unknown artists demonstrated they deserved to be seen more widely and more often.

Such a one is April Kamunde showing a painting she based on a photograph. Called Juju (Kimeru for grandmother), it is a striking portrait with the hair and passages of her shawl particularly well handled.

It is Kamunde’s first exhibition and it marks a spirited debut.

Then there is an untitled mixed media piece by Nicy Aluoch with its spatters of white paint over indications of flowers and fragments of type, which shows a certain bravado, while Sammy Lutaya’s Evening Crown is a Surrealist essay of a human figure morphing into perky guinea fowl; the reddist painting in a very red show.

With 65 works to look at, it might be thought an effort to stand out, yet this was achieved by Kevo Stero from Maasai Mbili and Andrew Ngoja who is new to me.

insecurities

‘Insecurities’ by Andrew Ngoja. This repurposed collage with its fractured planes set against a bold red and black background attempted to create a new reality reflecting the mood of the title. Promising. PHOTO | FRANK WHALLEY

Stero, with typical wit presented a cockerel wearing a mask in a work painted on one of the relief food sacks recently distributed throughout Kibera, the sprawling Nairobi slum.

Its irregular shape also took the eye — a cheeky, throwaway laugh in your face — while with Ngoja’s digital print it was the grimacing head that grabbed attention.

Called Insecurities, this repurposed collage with its fractured planes set against a bold red and black background attempted to create a new reality reflecting the mood of the title. Promising.

Adam Masaka made a good attempt at layering interest into his two Coke delivery men by painting them with treacly impasto on tin sheets. Happily, Coke packaging is red.

Then we have many better known and established artists joining in the fun.

Justus Kyalo also used tin sheets as the basis for two of his excellent abstract landscapes (with two tiny canvases nearby) and Florence Wangui showed a single haunting figure in profile in her painting Time Precepts.

Thom Ogonga was firmly in control with taut outlines structuring a typical night club scene and Sebawali Sio presented a crouching woman in a furious Expressionist romp called Inferno.

Ehoodi Kichape offered a riotous Red Alligator which I liked enormously (Bring me that alligator and make it snappy!) and opposite it Maggie Otieno showed a steel sculpted head wearing a barbed wire mask painted red (of course) and a golf ball studded with nails to represent the all-too-topical virus.

A flight of butterflies by Sophie Walbeoffe lit one wall and close by was a rather good reclining Figure on a Couch by Coster Ojwang’.

David Thuku’s Made in Elsewhere series was meticulously constructed with layers of cut-out papers and continued his theme of product packaging as evidence of mass consumption.

Cruder packaging material, corrugated cardboard, was used to great effect by Charles Ngatia in his two bright and quirky views of Shanty Town.

The quality of any open show can be variable — there were works there that might not thrill us all — but the prices reflected this and there was a lot to like too… so much so that if you turn up with your cheque book you could just end up, well, in the red.

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