Aimé Mpané "Faces"
Skoto Gallery
This event has ended.
Congolese-born artist Aime Mpane's mixed media work consistently chronicle contemporary historical upheavals in post-colonial Africa, including the present turmoil in his homeland and forces us to confront its impact on the lives of children, the most vulnerable in society and re-imagine the innocence of youth as victim of war.
Harnessing a capacious imaginative energy and a ferocious will, Aime Mpane mines the themes of power and vulnerability in society and implicates our collective unconsciousness in a hidden scandal and secret shame. He creates a body of work of harrowing beauty and insightfulness that constitute a remarkable statement about children and war, simultaneously playing on the ambivalences that assert the strength and fragility of his subjects, revealing a deep tragic outcome in which trauma and the memory of trauma are central. He utilizes the extreme gesture and emotionality of his medium by slashing, chipping and chopping with the adze – a traditional wood carving tool - on wood panel, illuminating the various faces of war in their raw, awkward and blunt forms, evocative of the diverse states of the human condition from the political to the metaphysical - a fit metaphor for the violence and dire conditions that have befallen the country throughout most of its modern history.
Media
Schedule
from February 12, 2009 to March 21, 2009
Opening Reception on 2009-02-12 from 18:00 to 20:00