pen and ink on paper

Artwork date: 1962
Signature details: each signed and dated; each inscribed with the respective title on the reverse

(6)

19 x 14.5 cm each

Accompanied by Okeke, U. (2019). Art in Development – A Nigerian Perspective. Beiruth: Iwalewa Books. Works include: Animal Head with Horns; Six Faces; Head from an Animal with Horns; Conversation; Sisy and Palm Grove

Notes:

Christopher Uchefuna Okeke, known asUche Okeke, was born in Nimo in Nigeria in 1933. A seminl Figure in morden, twentieth century Nigeria art, he is also perhaps the most famous and influential historical figure in arts education in the country. Throughout his long and storied career, he was an academic, administrator, organiser and activist for the power arts educationin Nigeria and the African continent in general. Okeke's major concern and most important philosophical contribution to the visual arts in Nigeria was what he called the process on natural synthesis. Many artists in South Africa in the middle decades of the twentieth century attempted to find a visual language for the conflicts and cross-fertilisation currents that had taken places between European and African art styles and ideas over centuries. Perhaps the most prominent example in South Africa was the Amadlozi group in the 1960s, which challenged the modernist and even avant - gardist European schools with their African sensibility and traditions - for example, they challenged the ways i which Picasso and Cubism drew exqlicity on African spiritualism and representational styles. For Okeke, this process and reality for African art, in particular, Nigeria art impacted as it was by colonial education systems in particular, had to be thought of as a new, morden style of it's own, Capturing both the essence of African spirituality as it was expressed in art, along with European styles and sensibilities. This was what he called the process of natural sythesis, each traditional flowing naturally into one another to establish a new way of making art and how it expressed modern Nigerian culture in particular. To this end Okeke was specially concerned to preserve some of the older, sacred art making traditions in Nigeria. Prominent among these was the Uli painting style of the Igbo people. Okeke had studied the belief system and art traditions of some prominent Nigerian cultures - the Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa peoples - and Uli painting, with its immense antiquity and its immediate connection to the spiritual world in its use of iconography' paint and design, as well as its refusal to draw a distinction between art and design, appealed to him as a symbol of what modern natural sythesis could mean. Okeke's early involvement with Zaria Art Society in the late 1950s was an attempt to insitutionalise this approach, and it was during this time that these exquisite suites of pen and ink drawings were produced. The figures in each suite are predominantly figures from myth, from Igbo and other folk traditions, rendered in a bold and expressive graphic style in keeping with Okeke's goal producing art in a morden idiom but honouring his own traditions.

James Sey