ruby onyinyechi amanze / DUETS / 2022
Goodman Gallery presents DUETS, an exhibition of new large-scale works on paper by ruby onyinyechi amanze, marking the artist’s fourth exhibition with the gallery.
DUETS expands on the artist’s decade-long commitment to the discipline of drawing. Using a palette of seven recurring visual elements, amanze creates an expansive world that pushes against the idea of narrative. With no hierarchy, the seven include: architecture, birds, ada, bike, swimming pool and audre, with the final element being the paper itself. For this series, positioned as a choreographer of sorts, amanze experiments with placing these elements into pairings.
amanze’s practice pulls inspiration from the spatial negotiations found in design and the three-dimensional practices of dance and architecture. As part of an ongoing exploration, the malleability of space remains the primary antagonist.
Artworks
About
ruby onyinyechi amanze
ruby onyinyechi amanze (b. 1982, Port-Harcourt, Nigeria) is a Brooklyn-based artist of Nigerian descent and British upbringing whose creative practices and processes focus on producing mixed media, paper-based drawings and works. Her art draws inspiration from photography, textiles, architecture and print-making.
amanze’s practice builds around questions of how to create drawings that maintain paper’s essence of weightlessness. The large-scaled and multi-dimensional drawings are part of an ongoing, yet non-linear narrative that employ the malleability of space as the primary antagonist.
A nameless, self-imagined, chimeric universe has simultaneously been positioned between nowhere and everywhere. Using a limited palette of visual elements, including ada the Alien, windows and birds, amanze’s drawings create a non-narrative and expansive world. The construction of this world is largely centered around an interest in the spatial negotiations found in the three dimensional practices of dance, architecture and design.
Most recently, amanze completed two-year long residencies at the Queens Museum and as part of the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions Program, both in New York. She has exhibited her work internationally in Lagos, London, Johannesburg and Paris, and nationally at the California African American Museum, the Drawing Center and the Studio Museum of Harlem.
amanze earned her B.F.A., Summa Cum Laude, from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and her M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art. In 2012-2013, amanze was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
Today she resides between Philadelphia and Brooklyn, but calls multiple places home.
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