Bruce Onobrakpeya (Nigerian, Born 1932) Zaria Indigo Unframed.
Procedencia : [Propriété non datée]
- The renowned Nigerian modernist printmaker, Bruce Onobrakpeya (b. 1932), began his artistic career in the early 1960s after training as a painter at the Nigerian College of Art, Science and Technology, Zaria (1957-1961)
- As a second-year student, along with his friends Uche Okeke, Demas Nwoko, he was a leading member of the now legendary Art Society (1958-61), established primarily to encourage its members study and experiment with indigenous art and design to counter the European-oriented curriculum, colonial era art training offered them
- This groupalongside their contemporaries in literature, theatre, and musicwere at the vanguard of postcolonial modernism in Nigeria in the years after political independence in 1960
- Onobrakpeya and the Art society saw the practice and reality of Nigerian and African political independence as opportunity and justification for inventing a new formal language and attitude expressive of artistic and cultural freedom as well as postcolonial self-assertion
- In recognition of the multiple heritages with which they identified, the Art Society promoted a theory of natural synthesis that proclaimed the necessity of combining, in their work, indigenous and western modernist aesthetics, forms and processes
- Onobrakpeya's earliest body of work, made while in Zaria, consisted of oil paintings in a style largely influenced by the French postimpressionists, especially Paul Gauguin's Tahiti period 'tropical' palette, pastoral scenes and mythopoeic subject matter
- For Onobrakpeya, themes from his ancestral Urhobo folklore and metaphysics offered exciting opportunities for exploration of pictorial language that is at once modernist and culturally familiar (Eketeke vbe Erevbuye, and Hunter's Secret, both 1961)
- Because of the persistence of saturated, high-key colour scheme in these and other of his 1960s paintings, Onobrakpeya designated them as belonging to his 'Sunshine Period' work
- Besides the interest in folkloric subjects, Onobrakpeya and the Art Society (all from southern Nigeria) frequently painted genre scenes from northern Nigeria, fascinated by the region's markedly different cultural, social, and natural environment
- One such subject is indigo pit dyeing an ancient craft for which Zaria and Kano (two of the seven original Hausa city-states) are famous
- An undated oil painting, Zaria Dye Pits, likely painted in 1960 (and several preliminary studies) provided the basic pictorial elements for Zaria Indigo (1962) and a number of subsequent serigraph prints that constitute what the artist calls the 'Zaria Indigo' series.* Painted while Onobrakpeya was completing his post-graduate teacher's diploma or shortly after, Zaria Indigo (1962) is remarkable, for it represents one of the earliest instances of a radical departure from the painting style of his student years
- A comparison with Zaria Dye Pits shows this change
- The earlier work, which depicts an indigo dyer in loose orange trousers, aquamarine shirt and large orange hat sitting behind his dye-filled pit, is painted in the artist's school period naïve-naturalistic style
- However, in Zaria Indigo, the focus appears to be on the culturally resonant decorative image
- Rather than modelling his forms as before, here he relies on flat, patterned colour areas and shapes to realize the Art Society ambition of decolonizing art, not by rejecting the modernism of early 20th-century Europeans, but by combining some of its elements with those from indigenous Nigerian and African art and design
- Equally important is the introduction of a landscape element in the composition as if to pictorially locate the scene more emphatically in the Zaria environment
- The horizontal line marking off the yellow hilly range from the blue-tinged sky is in fact a stylized rendering of the Kufena Hills, a massive granitic rock forma
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Condition_report : The work has been re-lined. It does have some minor re-touching across the work.
