Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Chibuike Uzoma, whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, photography, drawing, text, and video. Titled To Kick a Stone, this show explores pictorial illusion and the agency of the viewer. Presented alongside a sound piece by Joāo Orecchia and a film work by Edward Owens, the exhibition will run from 19 January to 25 February 2023.
Comprising colourful, abstruse portraitures against stark black and white backgrounds, the paintings in To Kick a Stone are deeply suggestive, but ultimately formalist explorations of shape and composition. Functioning as prompts, the paintings play on our proclivity to anthropomorphise and personify images. Probing the relationship between pictorial illusion, individual shapes and complete images, Uzoma’s new works are often bordered with lettering that doubles as a compositional element and an evocative detail for viewers to delve into.
