Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Pelagie Gbaguidi’s ‘The Colours are the Bark’, the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery and in South Africa.
‘The Colours are the Bark’, brings together a range of works made throughout a number of years, tracing the artist’s extensive oeuvre. Featuring paintings, drawings and mixed media works the show is an exploration of “the big and small stories that take our beings towards the burning questions of the world, urging us to go beyond the surface,” says Gbaguidi.
Gbaguidi’s candid and sometimes tongue-in-cheek creations depict splintered figures in different forms and settings – moving, contorting, shapeshifting. As rigorous colour erupts alongside subtle hues, creatures lay next to other creatures, they merge with animal and plant life and other objects, breaking the hard edges between me/us/them/it.
Artworks
About
Pélagie Gbaguidi
Pélagie Gbaguidi (b. 1965, Dakar, Senegal), describes herself as a contemporary ‘griot’ – a West African storyteller – which she defines as someone who functions as an intermediary between individual memory and ancestral past. Her work is an anthology of the signs and traces of trauma and is centred on colonial and postcolonial history. She recontextualises archives and official histories to reveal processes of forgetting. The materially embodied images created by Gbaguidi through painting, drawing, performance and installation seek to break out of binary thinking, archetypes and simplifications.
Biennales and major international exhibitions include: Berlin Biennale (2020), Lubumbashi Biennale (2019), Dakar Biennale (2004, 2006, 2008, 2014 and 2018) and documenta 14 (2017). Her work has featured in group shows at Centre Pompidou-Metz, WIELS (Brussels), Musée Rochechouart, Middelheimmuseum (Antwerp), Stadtmuseum (Munich), MMK (Frankfurt), and the National Museum of African Art – Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.).
Collections include: Artothèque, Saint-Denis, Réunion, France; Casa África, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain; CNAP Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris, France; Holocaust Memorial Foundation, Chicago, United States of America; KANAL-Centre Pompidou, Brussels, Belgium; Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett, permanent loan from the Hüni-Michel-Stiftung, Basel, Switzerland; M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art / City of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium; Memorial ACTe, Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, France; and the Mu.ZEE, Ostend, Belgium
S.M.A.K. Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent, Belgium
Gbaguidi lives and works in Brussels.
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