NYAB Event - Khalid Kodi "Blue Tales"

Khalid Kodi "Blue Tales"

Skoto Gallery

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Khalid Kodi’s recent work continues his exploration of strategies that fuse personal history and experience with his desire to portray social, spiritual and utopian transformations. He creates works that are infused with strong references to magical realism and deep concern for the aesthetic struggle between form and concept. He uses contemporary themes drawn from the rich story-telling traditions of his homeland to construct intricately layered and textured pictures that demonstrate a mastery of design, color, composition and draftsmanship. The often repetitive, sensitive and exploratory brushstrokes in his work are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. His landscapes are not representations of nature in the traditional sense of the term, rather they are abstract expressions of new artistic and spiritual possibilities, using planes of color and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields that are at once both a direct expression o f the sensations of the observing eye and an abstraction from observed nature.

Born in Sudan, Khalid Kodi is a prolific artist who has emerged as a central figure of his generation working on multi/cross-cultural concepts that focus on the milestones of human life. His past series have included works that poignantly address human phenomena such as wars, genocide and their impact on human societies. These works incorporate sculpture, paintings, installations and environmental sites, and possess unique qualities of ripeness and continuous growth. They convey a sense of mystery that reveals the complex context of his formal and conceptual innovations, and allude to a balanced art, not in the sense that it is stabilized or moderate in its effects, but that opposed qualities are joined in a scrupulously controlled play. He is inventive and original in many different aspects of his art, evocative of the power of art to speak to us purely on human terms.