NYAB Event - Marcia Kure "Fashionable Hybrids"

Marcia Kure "Fashionable Hybrids"

BravinLee Programs

This event has ended.

BravinLee programs presents “Fashionable Hybrids” new work on paper by Marcia Kure, born in Nigeria. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition at BravinLee.

Marcia Kure’s imagery is partially influenced by ancient cave drawings in southern Africa, as well as the traditional Uli murals and body painting of Nigeria. For this exhibition, the “Fashionable Hybrids” Kure creates a cast of female character forms that are surrealistically formed and fantastically costumed, that possess a detached glamour, evoking the cold aggression and sexuality of fashion, advertising and military uniforms and heraldry. Inspired by contemporary currents in haute couture, Kure’s designs are smart and exotic. The figures seem other-worldly, militaristic and touch on sources that range from Victorian and British Colonial to the Gothic. Precisely rendered and beautifully and intricately executed, Kure’s handling of drawing and water-based mediums recall Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. Kure’s intricate images of implausible figures compel the viewer to consider a world condition that is glamorous, and strange, splendid and terrifying.

This exhibition is concurrent with an exhibition of editioned photo based montages being held at Susan Inglett Gallery in New York. The two exhibitions are explained in the artist’s statement:

The “Fashionable Hybrids” series evolved from my “Dressed Up” series (2009-2010), the photomontage portraits constructed from fragments of bodies and fashion associated with Hip-Hop and Victorian/contemporary haute couture. The “Dressed Up” series dramatized the visible difference between the two modes of dress and the social worlds they invoke in order to dismantle the usual cultural and social boundaries cloth imposes on bodies, and to challenge the ways human beings are defined by what they wear. The “Fashionable Hybrids” series goes even further. In it, visual elements from Disney cartoon, Japanese Anime and Manga, medieval fashion, military outfits, and contemporary couture fashion collide with pictorial forms inspired by the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, Roy Lichtenstein, Jan Vermeer, Gustav Klimt, Dominique Ingres and Édouard Manet. The resulting figures, with their quirky and delirious anatomical structures, revel in their hybridity, as if they are proud avatars of extreme fashion. (Marcia Kure, Princeton, NJ. 2011).

[Image: Marcia Kure "Backward Journeys Echo" (2010) watercolor, pencil, gouache and collage on fabriano paper 30 x 25 in.]

Media

• Graphics
• Illustration

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