Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Colour & Form in BLACK, a solo exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Burundi-born, Johannesburg-based artist Serge Alain Nitegeka at its flagship Chelsea location. The exhibition presents a new body of work that demonstrates the artist’s recent experimentations with form, color, and space. Colour & Form in BLACK is Nitegeka’s second solo exhibition since joining the gallery in 2014. It will be on view March 17 – April 23, 2016, at 509 West 24th Street.
This exhibition presents the current trajectory of Nitegeka’s practice, in which the artist pursues a visceral and unmediated engagement with formal questions of line, color and volume. Here, Nitegeka deepens his commitment to abstraction, evoking Russian constructivism with these works’ clean, structured lines and boldly oscillating colors, compositions notably born not from forethought, but rather from the freeform aesthetic spontaneity that alights when artist and picture plane meet.
The resultant compositions – in both two and three dimensions – appeal to the viewer’s visual, tactile and spatial senses. Lines and shapes are rendered in shades of black, robin’s egg blue, ivory white, golden yellow, and deep crimson, both shaping space and denying it, framing it and setting it free. Demonstrating the artist’s ongoing move into pure abstraction, they encourage the viewer’s intuitive, aesthetic engagement, in a manner that befits the organic conditions of their own creation.
Nitegeka evokes the transcendental force and rich potential of the colour black to illustrate the ineffable essence of these works:
“The colour black is primordially predisposed to a deep, dark, mysterious simplicity. It doesn’t need to be explained, it refuses to be enlightened. It just is. However, given form and in the company of other colours, the colour black reveals itself robust and beautiful, proving itself a flat mental space void of everything yet rich in anything; a solid, ambiguous colour. The colour black is my point of departure from the unknown into the unknown. I don’t know where I am from or where I am headed. I am from the black heading back into the black.”
Serge Alain Nitegeka’s practice comprises abstract painting, sculpture, large-scale installation, and figurative drawing, repurposing modernist preoccupations with line and the picture plane to address larger cultural and political issues. Nitegeka’s work has been shown throughout South Africa, Senegal, Europe, and the United States. His first solo exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, Morphings in BLACK, opened in November 2014 at the BOESKY EAST, the gallery’s Lower East Side location. In 2015, Nitegeka’s work was included in the South African Pavilion at the 56th international Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia , as well as the Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Gothenburg, Sweden. In spring 2015, he presented his largest site-specific installation to date, Structural Response II, at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA. Nitegeka (b. 1983, Burundi) currently lives and works in Johannesburg.
