Cape Town

STEVENSON is pleased to present Innate Black, a solo exhibition by Serge Alain Nitegeka, his sixth with the gallery.

In previous exhibitions, Nitegeka has sought to give shape to charged emotional and political spaces. In Innate Black, his immersive environments use colour and form to shift perception into an embodied process of contemplation.  Environs alternately characterised by restraint and abandon invite meditations on the nature of the relationship between the somatic and cerebral. Spanning sculpture, painting and installation, Nitegeka’s oeuvre has traditionally observed the formal and philosophical connotations of the colour black; in Innate Black he considers ‘what is lived but cannot be explained’.

Nitegeka writes:

It begins with a mark, the first line, and the immediate. The twisted shape of bacon on the breakfast plate, the smoky acrid Jo’burg morning air, the rushed and chaotic commute from home to studio – everything and nothing goes into that line. The act of drawing, of thinking, of looking and mark-making is an exercise in the mundane, but perhaps even more an act of channelling the terrestrial and the primordial. The innate need to make a mark visits me every so often, in the pristine confines of white walls before a show or in the secluded studio space with my plywood surfaces – searching for the elusive configuration of forms and colours that convey that which is innately immersive and sacred.

The exhibition opens on Thursday 30 August, 6-8pm.