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Kimathi Donkor - 'Hawkins & Co'
The Market Place Gallery in Armagh is delighted to host a solo show of new paintings by artist Kimathi Donkor, entitled ‘Hawkins & Co’, which will feature a brusque overthrow of one of oil painting’s more obvious conventions (using the ‘reverse’ side).
As with his previous group shows in London and Liverpool, the starting point for the artist’s first exhibition outside England is Sir John Hawkins, the Elizabethan slave trader whose portrait was re-hung in the National Maritime Museum in 2007.
Donkor’s mixed media canvases focus on concepts of culture, power and knowledge flowing in the wake of the mariner’s misdeeds. According to the artist, “I wanted to express the weird irony that the wood-stretched canvases favoured by artists in pursuit of truth and beauty uses such similar materials to the masts and sails of the old slave-trading ships. Simply exposing the hidden construction of these mass-produced contemporary fetish objects, seemed a very straight-forward way for me to do it. But, there’s also the question of how profits were ‘recycled’. Most slave-labour products – tobacco, sugar, coffee and cloth – were quickly consumed. But, as an artist, I’m intrigued by the thought that slave-produced cotton, flax, indigo, hemp or wood still survives in the canvases, papers, oils, frames and pigments of the world’s mansions and art museums.”
As well exposing the raw materials of wood and canvas usually hidden in paintings, Donkor has pursued his experiments with ‘Nkisi Nkondi’ impalement and ‘Santeria’ aesthetics that, he says, synthesise visual traditions from each side of Hawkins’ voyaging triangle between Africa, Europe and the Americas. These sacred elements, with their emphasis on intimate histories, desires and hopes reflect the passionate humanity captured in the artist’s portrait subjects. MoreSaturday 10 May to Saturday 7 June.
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