Rele Gallery Lagos is pleased to present for our inaugural exhibition in our new space, a group exhibition titled New Ground. Featuring works by Temitayo Ogunbiyi, Osi Audu, Annick Kamgang, Sedireng Mothibatsela, Kelani Abass and Papa Omotayo, the exhibition explores the generative qualities of drawing and line in creating composite forms and spheres of knowledge. As the gallery moves into a new space, a blank canvas for the playing out of future possibilities, the fluidity of drawing and its capacity for transformation forms an essential starting point. Here, line becomes a promise, one of vast potentiality reproducing endless possibilities in space.
The exhibition presents artists working across diverse themes in dialogue on modes of mark-making and image production, through a build-up of component parts, simultaneously creating and archiving language and visual experience. Showcased works loosen drawing from the associative, presenting it as an independent form and challenging traditional ideas of technique and material. In this exhibition, drawing is considered across process and form, a layered artistic dimension by itself, capable of crafting complex narratives and worlds, as well as acting as a site for the production of self, memory and parallel realities.
The works in New Ground probe the qualities of line, light and shade, examining the poetics of drawing and its two-fold capacity to represent and to invent. The exhibition explores negotiations between artist and medium, graphic line and background; from Osi Audu's constructivist drawings to Annick Kamgang's illustrations to the ethereal smoke drawings of Sedireng Mothibatsela, we are ushered into considerations of the possibilities of representation as well as the formation of visual elements and landscapes.
