Monthly Archives: May 2013

Art Nairobi and Le Rustique are delighted to exhibit Synthesis: remixing locality by 3 artists from Namibia, Finland and USA.

Opens at Le Rustique restaurant on May 25, 2013
Exhibition Dates: Until June 26, 2013

Exhibiting Artists: Nicky Marais – Namibia, Mikko Ijas – Finland and Andries Fourie – USA

Nicky Marais
Nicky Marais is a Namibian painter and mixed-media artist. She employs a vocabulary of abstract forms and colour relationships that originate primarily from the Namibian landscape. Her paintings evoke a variety of geological landforms, plants as well as the material culture of her arid, sparsely populated and ruggedly beautiful homeland.
Nicky Marais is a Namibian artist, activist and educator who lives in Windhoek, Namibia, and heads the Visual Arts Department at the College of the Arts.

Mikko Ijas
Mikko lives and works in Helsinki. The means this artist uses to execute his drawings is everything but traditional. By combining the disciplined observation and skill of a traditional draughtsman or painter with the capabilities of contemporary digital equipment and technology (ipad), Ijas produces luminous and colorful drawings that are new and familiar at the same time. In his drawings, Ijas balances an interest in perception and realism with meaningful, productive distortion. In doing so his work is in dialogue with the history and traditions of painting while he also acknowledges the influence of contemporary artist like David Hockney, who explores similar interest in drawings on hand-held electronic devices. Written by Andries Fourie

Andries Fourie
Ancestral Voices: From Slaves to Matriarchs
This body of mixed-media works on paper addresses the role of South and Southeast Asian slave women, transported to South Africa by the Dutch in the 17thand 18th century, in shaping Afrikaans language, culture and identity. The aim of this work is to acknowledge this painful history, and to celebrate the diverse, non-western roots of Afrikaans culture.
While the work examines the influence of slave women in general, it also does so by focusing on the lives of two of the artist’s own slave ancestors: Ansela van Bengale and Catharina van Palliacatte.
Andries Fourie was born in Tshwane (Pretoria), South Africa in 1968. His work deals largely with contemporary and historical aspects of South African culture. In 1989, he immigrated to the United States. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at Willamette University in Salem Oregon, where he teaches sculpture.