rosewood, memory foam, white grogged earthenware, glazed crank clay, electric blue matt, resin, stag skeleton, cow femur, gold luster, lightPublic Gallery
Description
Human-crafted. AI-refined.
This contemporary art piece features a vibrant blue background that contrasts with the natural, earthy elements arranged across the canvas. The composition consists of various organic shapes and textures, including a small flame, a red and blue fragment, and several bone-like structures. The artist has employed a minimalist approach, allowing the materials to take center stage and create a visually striking juxtaposition. The work invites the viewer to ponder the symbolic relationship between the natural and the artificial, hinting at deeper conceptual themes that may reflect the artist's exploration of mortality, spirituality, or the human experience. ...
In painting, sculpture, and performance, Emmanuel Awuni engages with African oral traditions and diasporic musical cultures, from hip-hop to jazz, reggae, and Afrobeats. Early experiences playing the traditional West African game Oware in Ghana—where rhythm, strategy, and attentive interaction are central—continue to shape his approach, emphasizing relationality, continuity, and the rhythmic interplay between participants. Awuni’s work mobilizes these diasporic traditions to interrogate power structures, cultural hierarchies, and institutional authority. Drawing parallels between systems of incarceration and the curation of cultural knowledge, he critiques how museums and encyclopedic collections often contain non-Western cultures within rigid, objectified frameworks. Music serves as both metaphor and method, with Awuni framing any form of repressed expression as a ‘song’ against structures of oppression. His installations reconfigure cast busts and found objects, set upon ceremonial blue packing foam bases, transforming them into spiritual presences that invite recognition and ritual care. Across gallery spaces, his paintings unfold with free abstraction, guided by breath and intuition, while sculptural works reveal the emergence of latent material into metaphysical being, offering viewers an experience of transformation, liberation, and the persistent resonance of diasporic histories. ...
