Those We Remember or Are Yet to Meet

Goodman Gallery Cape Town is pleased to present Those We Remember or Are Yet to Meet, a new solo exhibition by Kenyan artist Chemu Ng’ok featuring nine paintings recently completed in her Nairobi studio.

The presentation is dominated by six ambitiously scaled acrylic and oil on canvases, including a diptych measuring over three metres in length, all presenting hazily rendered figural assemblies in a high-key palette. Ng’ok’s exhibition also includes two new gestural abstractions in the style of work presented in her 2023 debut solo in London with the gallery, The Longing.

The artist, skilfully deploys form, colour and line to negotiate the transitory as well as transitionary states of human life, capturing the ambivalence in forms and structures within her paintings. While informed by the swirl of thoughts and emotions prompted by lives in transition, Ng’ok’s new paintings remain consistent with her broader ambition to transform psychological states into physical form.

During the production of these works in Nairobi, she kept a journal closely linked to her practice. Its entries emerged as lean, aphoristic reflections. “A lot of my practice is rooted in making the intangible idea real or a physical presence,” she wrote. “Painting is making fleeting moments real, anchoring them into a physical archive.” Elsewhere, she describes her paintings as rendering “that which is experienced in real time – a memory, a longing, a feeling, a trace – onto the canvas in the form of lines, coding, dashes, commas.”

Source: Goodman Gallery Website