The Tree (2008), by Ibrahim El-Salahi:
This work, featured in El-Salahi's solo exhibition at TATE Modern in 2013, is from his celebrated Tree series and reflects his fascination with the Haraz tree, which is indigenous to Sudan, and which has peculiar and inspirational characteristics.
“I am very much obsessed with my work. I am a painter and have no other profession. I go to bed dreaming of figures, forms, and colors and wake up to translate my visions and dreams into works of art. My style changes, but I keep working on one particular theme inspired by a tree, an acacia locally called the Haraz that grows on the banks of the Nile. During the rainy season the tree is leafless, and it blossoms with freshly budding green leaves when the weather turns dry and the river flows at its lowest towards the sea. Through all, the tree remains steadfast, silently watching over the passage of seasons and time."
Of the Haraza’s blooming he says; “ This is a definitive statement. Like saying ‘I am me! I am an individual! I do not follow what everyone is doing! When everyone is going to be green, let them be green. I am not!’ It’s individuality. I love that very much.” – Ibrahim El-Salahi, Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams, Tate Catalogue, 2013
This series is an ongoing investigation into the tree-body metaphor, a link between heaven and earth, creator and created; controlled meditations with the emphasis on the spiritual.
MOMA, TATE, Guggenheim, British Museum, National Museum of African Art Washington, and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and Newark Museum all hold El-Salahi’s work in their collections. He is undoubtedly one of the most important and influential figures in African and Arabic modernism.
HA-HA (2022) by Lakwena Maciver:
This work, now available to the public, is from Lakwena Maciver solo exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, earlier this year (2023).
For the exhibition, Maciver took inspiration from YSP’s landscape and particularly the 18th-century ha-has – concealed walled ditches that were built to stop livestock straying into the gardens without the need for visible fences. Simultaneous with the ha-has’ construction, the 18th/19th century Enclosure Acts dramatically changed the configuration of land in this country, removing ‘commoners’ access, placing it in private ownership and demarcating it with partitions. The artist uses these historic ideas to comment on how in today’s society, despite the illusion of openness, public speech and public space are increasingly tightly controlled by a privileged elite.
The idea of paradise, a transcendent and idyllic space of healing, recurs in Maciver’s practice and she describes her works as “escape routes, afrofuturistic portals to utopia”. In developing her ideas for this new exhibition, Lakwena considered YSP’s verdant landscape as representing an Eden-like place that once belonged to wealthy landowners but is now openly accessible by a diverse audience.
Anthony (2022) by Lakwena Maciver:
Anthony Webb
5'6" - 1.68 m
Known as "Spud"
Era: 1985-1998
Born and/or raised: Dallas, Texas
Key facts: Shortest player to win an NBA dunk contest. Rarely referred to as Anthony, always known as Spud.
NBA Team(s): Atlanta Hawks (4) / Sacramento Kings / Minnesota Timberwolves / Orlando Magic
Maciver’s Jump Paintings, exhibited at Hastings contemporary in 2022, consist of abstract portraits of some of the most inspiring Basketball Players past and present. For the series, the artist took physical and biographical references as a starting point. Each work is titled with the first name of the player and is the same height as the individual. They are painted on bespoke, slim wooden panels and given a seductive, almost mirror-like gloss. This idea of reflection adds a personal interactive element to the viewing experience both conceptually and experientially.
"I like the notion of the basketball court as a platform or a stage where the players become almost like superheroes… The heights that they soar to… it’s like they are flying, somehow able to rise above the limitations of this world. This is especially poignant for me given that basketball is indisputably dominated by African Americans, and their style of play has shaped the game... I’m interested in what brings us closer together, so for me these paintings are about being aspirational, dreaming, and the connection between people, but also about the link between heaven and earth and ourselves as individuals in relation to a higher power.
The politicisation of the game is something I’m interested in exploring. The ‘slam dunk’ for instance, one of Basketball’s great crowd pleasers, could be seen as a physical manifestation of black power. So much so that it was banned in 1967 for 10 years, coincidentally after a year of Lew Alcindor’s domination of the game. I see these paintings as an opportunity to celebrate black power, joy, and self-expression."
The origins of these ‘Jump paintings’ stem from two full-size courts painted in 2020 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, to honour Senator Flowers, whose impassioned 2019 speech against ‘Stand Your Ground’ legislation went viral and inspired Lakwena in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement the following year. Entitled ‘I’ll bring you flowers’, the defiantly joyful paintings used the universality of the basketball court as a canvas to speak of hope in the face of oppression and blessing through adversity.
Paintings by Henrik Godsk:
Godsk is of seventh generation travelling heritage, having grown up among the world of his family’s funfair in Denmark and Norway. His practice reflects pride in his upbringing and cultural identity, fusing folkloric and high art, using portraits and ‘creatures’ as vessels for his exploration of colour and form. The artist's portraits are directly reminiscent of the accentuated designs of the fairground.
The formal components of the artwork are a direct result of the artist's time spent as a child painting and renovating the panels and façades of these rides. At twelve, he began to design and paint them himself; at fifteen, he came across books about Picasso and Modigliani, the latter’s elongated necks and distorted, flattened proportions heavily influencing Godsk’s current oeuvre. Then at 23 he left fairground life to become an artist. The controlled brushwork, geometric lines, flat surfaces, and tight compositions of his cubistic portraits act as a conduit for his personal exploration of classically modernist forms. In these angular paintings, Cubism’s traditionally busy, saturated style is pared down in terms of composition, typically just one woman or creature against a monochrome or simplified background. By playing with artistic conventions of the past, Godsk offers a refreshing take on portraiture through the lens of his cultural upbringing and love of twentieth-century modernism.
Paintings by Johnny Abrahams:
Deceptively simple, Abrahams' paintings present a unique vocabulary of satisfying meditative yet rhythmic shapes rendered with a rich texture which plays strongly with the negative space of the raw canvas.
The relationships between the symbols that are Abraham’s alphabet are dependent on nothing other than themselves. There is a sense of musicality to the compositions which convey rhythm, phasing and cadence with an unmistakable melodic character. In series, they intend to set the viewer up with both theme and variant, creating a simultaneous sense of both comfort and dissonance, hinting at a never realised pattern.
Abrahams craves a sense of balance without symmetry. The composition of each painting serves as an introduction to an overall pattern the viewer has only partial access to, suggesting a melody and then deviating from it, setting up a resolution and then arriving at an unexpected note. The forms within the compositions and the variations between individual paintings are experienced in the way microtones are experienced by a musician departing from a twelve-tone scale. The shapes seem familiar yet slightly askew and this is where the tension and drama are created, as they reference and avoid his self imposed structures. This play of chance reflects the artist's interest in the meeting of atoms; the contact between paint and canvas exacting a game of destiny.
