Egbenuoba, A Collection Of Five Drawings
Provenance :
Exhibited :
Literature : Uche Okeke, Art in Development - A Nigerian Perspective, Bayreuth 2019, 'Mansion in the Village' illustrated p. 135 cat. no. 60
Notes : Egbenuoba is a preparatory study for the 1961 oil painting of the same name in the collection of the National Council for Arts and Culture, Abuja, and illustrated in Chika Okeke-Agulu's Postcolonial Modernism (2015, fig. 3.7). Complete with the artist's colour notes ('orange, ochre & red') and annotations ('square jaw'), Okeke-Agulu speaks of the completed painting Egbenuoba as representing one of the artist's two distinct pictorial styles: "The first, characterised by dark, vigorous, painterly compositions featuring solidly modelled figural forms, is exemplified by Egbenuoba... In Egbenuoba, which refers to a masked performance of the hunters’ cult among the north-central Igbo, the figure is depicted as a fierce, moustached adult male with a titled man’s red cap adorned with red, spiked branches. The dramatically rendered ochre skin and facial features—particularly the dome-shaped, flaring nostrils, the burning, semicircular eyes, and the cantilevered eyelids—are set against the blue and red torso and a green-blue background. In these pictures Okeke combines the structural serendipity of Igbo carved face masks with an expressive palette. In so doing, he arrives at a pictorial language redolent, though in an indeterminate way, of early twentieth-century European modernist painting." (Ibid. pp. 99-100)
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