MARIE CLAIRE MESSOUMA MANLANBIEN

EUR 10,500 + VAT

Mater # 7 Ladies’ Garden, 2016 (Artwork in 11 parts)

Rafia, copper, ink

Dimensions: variable (280cm x 230cm in picture)

About this work

There’s a yonic sensibility to these abstract ink drawings on Japanese paper, each framed by a raffia fringe.  As C.C. McKee put it in Art Forum, ‘their imagery is at once floral and vaginal, a riff on Georgia O’Keefe and Judy Chicago that links folded paper, drawn folds and the folds of the labia in an intimate installation’. Such references are typical of how Manlanbien’s conjunction of African and Western influences turns around the way modernism appropriated the ‘primitive’ from an imperialist position.

MARIE-CLAIRE MESSOUMA MANLANBIEN BIOGRAPHY

Joseph Beuys and Senga Nengudi are feasible forerunners of Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien, as  the young French artist of Ivorian and Caribbean descent makes sculptural works which operate as ‘force fields’, and which she also uses in performance. These combine craft skills derived from the matriarchal Akan society in Côte d’Ivoire with traditional European sculptural techniques to arrive at hybrid objects. In Nottingham Contemporary curator Cedric Fauq’s words, Manlanbien ‘investigates and produces forms that belong to a certain concept of feminine blackness’ to produce ‘a language that escapes the coloniser’s gaze and understanding.’