Prof. Uche Okeke

(Nigerian, 1933-2016)

Primeval Forest (framed)

Footnotes

Provenance
A private collection.

Exhibited
Pendulum Art Gallery, Lagos,The Triumphs of Asele, works of Uche Okeke: an Exhibition Organized by Pendulum Art Gallery in Association with Art-in-Art Project in Conjunction with Professor Uche Okeke's 70th Anniversary at Pendulum Art Gallery (May 17 - 31, 2003).

Uche Okeke (1933-2016), the Nigerian painter, poet, and scholar, was a leading figure in Nigerian and African postcolonial modernism. He is best remembered as the leader and founding member of the Zaria Society (1958-1961), formed by a group of art students at the Nigerian College Art, Science and Technology, in the northern Nigerian city of Zaria. The Art Society, inspired by the movement toward political decolonization in Nigeria and Africa had called for a new modernist art that was based on vigorous experimentation with specific art forms associated with Nigerian artistic heritage. For him this meant the close study of traditional Igbo Uli body drawing and mural decoration, as well as folktales, as sources of artistic inspiration.

On graduation from Zaria, in the autumn of 1962, Okeke received a one-year scholarship to Munich, Germany, where he worked for nearly one year in a stained glass and mosaic studio. While in Lagos to process his travel papers, however, he began work on the Oja Suite drawings in which he translated key formal elements of Uli—the insistently lyrical, organic line; dynamic positive and negative space; and, primarily, the agwọlagwọ (spiral) and ọkala isi-nwaọji (concave three- or four-pointed star)—into a modernist pictorial language. He continued these experimental drawings in Munich. These he called the Munich Suite. The major difference between the two is that whereas the lines of pen-and-ink Oja Suite are clean and ascetic, the ink-and-brush Munich Suite avoid compositional details and thus more expressive. Both, without doubt represent Okeke's first successful invention of a personal visual language based on the organic lyricism of Igbo Uli body drawing.

In 1965, the year Okeke painted this featured work, he effectively broke away from his fixation on ink drawing (and gouaches), which spanned his Nok Suite (1958-59) and the Oja and Munich suites, returning to oils as his primary medium for the first time since Zaria. But the solid forms and flat shapes of colour that define his Zaria-period style (as in Jumaa and Ana Mmuo, both 1961), gave way to fervid brushwork and loosely defined forms. In the work presented here, Primeval Forest, and in other similarly-scaled 1965 paintings, including his masterpiece, Women's War, as well as Oyoyo (in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York), Okeke arguably achieved mastery of expressive painting. Given the elemental power and unprecedented scale of these 1965 paintings (in subsequent years he worked on a smaller scale), it is safe to conclude that he reached the height of his powers as a painter that year.

Earlier in 1962, Okeke made several gouache paintings, including one titled Primeval Forest, in which we see a dramatic transformation of his painting, from the flat planes and solidly modelled forms of the Zaria-period to a new pictorial attitude dominated by deliberate swooshes of vigorous, lyrical brushwork. Whereas in the 1962 Primeval Forest the pictorial space is flat and the forms are completely abstract (despite that it clearly insinuates vegetal growth with floral elements), this substantially scaled up 1965 version is less flat and more descriptive, with the ground and tree trunks rendered in umbers, barely distinct from the rich blue-greens and hot cadmiums of leaves and flowers. The disciplined and assertive brushwork of the 1962 works, gave way to more fervid painterly gesture and modelled forms. Moreover, the Uli spiral motifs that dominated his earlier gouaches and drawings, are largely gone, transformed into inchoate brushwork; in a few of the 1965 paintings, such as the Princeton University Art Museum's Adam and Eve, these motifs occur only sparingly.

While Okeke tempered the resolute flatness of space of his post-Oja Suite paintings of 1962, in this 1965 Primeval Forest, the forest scene, without any indication of perspectival space, is pictorially impenetrable. The tree forms stand like spiky sentinels and formless monstrosities. Here, Okeke is interested in the forest not so much as marker of the tropical, natural landscape, as a stage for the dramatic encounters with the metaphysical—of ancestral beings, deities and often-malevolent spirits and incarnate forces. This is the forest of folklore, that is the theatre of actions that shaped the world of the ancients, when the world was young, and a place where in lived memories only the strong dared enter, or where the luckless were banished.

We are grateful to Professor Chika Okeke-Agulu for his assistance with the compilation of the above footnote.