Njideka Akunyili Crosby - new perspectives in painting

Rooted in the history and traditions of painting, Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s practice contains ideas of hybridity in both form and content. Formally, her canvases are striking combinations of painting, drawing, printmaking, and collage, comprising acrylic mixed with colored pencil, pastel, charcoal, Xerox transfer, and marble dust. Likewise, her imagery brings together her diverse experiences living in Nigeria and on the east and west coasts of the United States, merging recollections of a range of experiences, both real and imagined. The results are complex, multi-layered canvases that weave together references to personal events, popular culture, and art history. The artist currently lives and works in Los Angeles, where she finds similarities to her home town of Enugu, Nigeria, in terms of the weather, light, color palette (in particular the hot yellows and warm chartreuse greens), and temporary architectural structures—such as the use of lightweight, translucent scrims to demarcate space—all of which feature in her recent works.
                                                     The Beautiful ones, 2013
Figures play a central role in Akunyili Crosby’s practice, which includes intense studies of individuals (as seen in the series “The Beautyful Ones” from 2014), couples (depicting herself and her husband), and groups of multi-generational families gathered around sitting rooms and dining tables. Her interior scenes are marked by formal and casual living spaces featuring combinations of realistically-rendered American and Nigerian domestic products set on crowded tables, as in Tea Time in New Haven, Enugu(2013), pointing to her experiences of both of these cultures and the fluidity of exchange between the two.
Akunyili Crosby’s work is typified by her bold use of blocks of color to organize the canvas and designate space, with simplified figures and interior features arranged within shallow planes. Her interest in printmaking influences the pared down approach to defining space and presenting information in distinct fields. Akunyili Crosby has also utilized printmaking to create a unique visual language: swathes of images from Nigerian magazines and other popular media—which she avidly collects and covets as a way of referencing her home—are presented through Xerox transfer, silkscreens, and other printing techniques. This repetition conveys the patterned fabrics and textures of carpets, wallpaper, draperies and clothing within her motifs.
                                    Tea Time in New Haven, Enugu, 2013
Yet it is the history of painting that has had the greatest influence on Akunyili Crosby’s compositions and approach to making art. As a student at Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, she studied Diego Velásquez (1599–1660) and Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664), as well as other Spanish School artists, the influence of which is particularly visible in “The Beautyful Ones” in both the posture of the figures and their arrangement in space. Contemporaries such as Kerry James Marshall (b.1955) and Chris Ofili (b.1968) also serve as inspiration, themselves both deeply indebted to painting traditions while at the same time departing from them. Their influence is evident in Akunyili Crosby’s experimentation with composition, including her signature mixture of sweeping gesture and intense detail. Her highly constructed images, such as Nwantinti (2012), take viewers on an optical journey through layers of paint, glazes, patterns, and textures—her scope at times as broad as to denote a wall, doorway or bed, at others as finely calibrated as to convey an individual sequin on a dress or jewel on an earring.
                                                     Wedding Portrait, 2012
                                                                                                           ---Rochelle Steiner

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