STEVENSON is pleased to present an exhibition of six new paintings by Odili Donald Odita.
In an interview from 2011, the artist uses a countryside stream as a metaphor for his approach to painting:
During the summer of 2009 I was in Williamstown, MA, and spent some time on a farm by a rolling stream watching the water undulate and move over a rock-bed beneath it. For me this rock-bed, like a drawing, was structure and armature. Additionally, the water was like colour, moving this way and that in a flow based not only on the structure of the rock-bed beneath it, but also on its own condition of what it was, as well as what it could become with other forces such as the wind and sun that beat down on it.
Since his last solo exhibition in Cape Town in 2008, Odita has created large murals at the US Mission to the United Nations in 2010; the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, in 2011; and a stained-glass installation in the 20th Avenue subway station in New York in 2012. These site-specific installations are three-dimensional counterparts to his paintings on canvas, and together they reveal the development of Odita's life-long meditation on colour.
Over the past three years, his meditative and persistent approach has earned him inclusion in the Phaidon publications Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting by Bob Nickas; Defining Contemporary Art - 25 Years in 200 Pivotal Artworks; and most recently Vitamin P2.
The exhibition opens on Thursday 18 October 2012, 6-8pm.
The artist will give a walkabout of his exhibition in support of the friends of the South African National Gallery on Friday 19 October at 11am. Cost is R20 (members and non-members); all are welcome.
The gallery is open from Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, and Saturday 10am to 1pm.
