Benedict Chukwukadibia Enwonwu M.B.E (Nigerian, 1917-1994) Negritude
Provenance : Provenance Acquired directly from the artist in Lagos, 1990. A private collection, London. This impressive oil painting is one of the finest examples of Enwonwu's late works. It synthesizes elements from two of his most celebrated series, Negritude and Africa Dances. The sinuous silhouette of the female figure is very similar to the artist's 1973 Negritude (illustrated fig.5.15 Ogbechie). The woman is depicted in profile, her head tilted forward, her elongated torso arcing in an s-curve. However, the woman's stance differs in one critical respect. In the 1973 painting, the figure has her arms pinned to the sides of her body, her legs together. By 1990, she is a woman in motion. Her left arm and leg extend before her, whilst her right limbs reach back. The pose is one that we see recurring time and again in Enwonwu's Africa Dances corpus. This late painting is characterised by the artist's move towards abstraction. As noted by Ogbechie, the formal structure has been reworked, 'eliminating all suggestions of physical and contextual boundaries by setting his dancing figures in an ambiguous pictorial space'. Bibliography S. Ogbechie, Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist, (Rochester, 2008), p.182.
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