Ekene Stanley Emecheta & Deborah Segun
Condo London 2024 | The Breeder x The Sunday Painter
January 20, 2024–February 17, 2024The Sunday Painter, London
Preview Weekend: Saturday 20 January & Sunday 21 January 2024, 12-6pm
Exhibition Opening hours: Wed – Sat, 12-6 pm
The Breeder is pleased to participate in Condo London 2024 with a two-person exhibition by painters Ekene Stanley Emecheta and Deborah Segun. Both artists explore the human condition with their imagery and tackle contemporary issues of gender, race, identity while linking the past with the present and the future through personal and communal narratives.
Emecheta’s work is characterized by a distinctive use of color and compositional technique and his iconography of figures is drawn from both fantasy, history and his private world. Each canvas starts with the intentional elimination of the protagonist’s skin color, over which Emecheta frames the subject’s posture and characteristics. Diverting the attention away from the skin color, he draws our focus to the figure itself and its surroundings broadening the interpretation and inviting the viewer to become physically and emotionally invested in the subject’s story.
Often Emecheta positions figures of African descent in places they usually are not accustomed to thereby disrupting the historical narrative. His portraits aim to capture the essence of the human condition, revealing fragments of the protagonist’s stories and identities. Emecheta’s subjects – desaturated yet detailed – are both real and imagined, often including people who have had an impact on his life, whether historical figures or family and friends.
Firmly rooted in her personal experiences, Deborah Segun’s work celebrates the diverse bodies of women through shape and color, portraiture and narrative, creating an important counter-point to both art historical and contemporary depictions of the female form. Her canvases are populated by the figures of voluptuous black women in varied graceful poses. Segun ultimately explores portraiture from a place of body sensitivity, shaping narratives around the power of vulnerability as a birthplace of joy, belonging, creativity and authenticity.
Segun continues her exploration of the idea of personal growth and the constant changes that we go through. Taking as a starting point the transition from childhood to womanhood as a universal and personal experience, Segun explores the subtle anxiety that comes with change. This new body of work focuses on the idea of trusting the constant process and leaning into change as it comes. The paintings depict a sense of intimacy in a way of understanding one’s self and allowing oneself to be present in an attempt to mend the relationship between past and present self. There is also a feeling of calmness and trust both in the expression and body language, in the way that the subjects are supporting each other, the slight co- dependency that almost creates a feeling that one can’t fully function without the other.
Bios
Ekene Stanley Emecheta (b.1994, Nigeria) is a self- taught artist, living and working between Lagos, Nigeria and London, UK. He has had two solo exhibitions with The Breeder Green Era and Truthful Waters which was reviewed at Frieze Magazine. His works are included in the collections of X Museum in Beijing, Xiao Museum in Rizhao, China, Akzo Nobel Foundation in the Netherlands, Comma Foundation in Belgium and Up Next Art Museum in Puerto Rico.
Deborah Segun (b. 1994, Nigeria) lives and works between Lagos, Nigeria and London, UK. She obtained a degree in Fashion Design at the Polimoda Institute of Fashion Design and Marketing in Florence, Italy in 2017. Solo exhibitions include: You Keep Going Through It, I’m Just Coming Back From It, The Breeder, Athens (2022); Ada Gallery, Accra (2022); The Little Things I Need to Make Me Whole (2022); How To Fall In Love, BEERS London, (2021); Being Free, SMO Contemporary Art Gallery, Lagos, Nigeria (2020); Play as Collective, AWCA, ArtxLagos Art Fair, Lagos, Nigeria (2019); Still Life, Art Oja, Lagos, Nigeria (2019); I Feel Like I Am, Relate Africa, Lagos, Nigeria, (2019). Segun’s work is included in the collection of X Museum in Beijing and Xiao Museum in Rhizhao, China. Upcoming presentations include Art Genéve and ART SG in Singapore with Pearl Lam Galleries.
CONDO LONDON 2024 : A COLLABORATIVE EXHIBITION BY ⑤⓪ GALLERIES ACROSS ②③ LONDON SPACES.
The Sunday Painter
