Kofi Agorsor - Tudɛvie (Calling): Gallery III, Accra
Past exhibition
Overview
MY BEAUTIES, 2010-2022
Gallery 1957 is pleased to present Kofi Agorsor: Tudɛvie (Calling), a special collection of slow-growth sculptures that the artist has been developing for over a decade. The sculptures are complemented by a cluster of the kind of paintings that Agorsor is known for, to connect his established art to his less exposed vein of practice. Both lines of work have been at the core of Agorsor’s pursuits since his early childhood training across ritual and post-colonial learning environments. The public may be less familiar with the sculptural bodies that have been lurking in the background.
The exhibition ‘Tudɛvie’—meaning ‘Calling’ or ‘Awakening’ in Agorsor’s Ewe language—explores his shape-shifting position within and beyond established frameworks for art. Where to fit a fellow who flows like water? Is he a painter or sculptor? Is he modernist, or contemporary? Does his art live in the objects, or in the social processes that produced them? Is his thinking Ewe, African, Global, or Transcendent?
What is on show?
The exhibition presents several bodies of work: the long, the lined, and illuminating networks. The long includes two ‘ensembles’ of tree-sized women; fourteen as solos, twelve as a set (‘My Beauties’). The alter-egos of both ‘beauties’ reappear in the paintings: twittering divinities of chromatic intensity.
The body of lined works consists of warped-and-carved heads (‘Positive Tycoons’); as well as abstract layered paintings pulsing with pigments. The illuminating consists of a Queen-and-her-children: the sacred ‘Da Kriso (Creatrix)’ of Ewe mythology. Da Kriso exists as multiplicity-in-a-body; permutations of life and interdependent ecologies.
Tudɛvie presents the pieces in performative scenes: shrine-like, stage-like, nested, and singing. Light and sound act as mediums in a cosmic interplay between the art and environment; between the object and its (con)text. Agorsor’s ‘outdooring’ of his sculptures can be seen as a ceremonial occasion. The secret the artist stored, leaves the privacy of his home.
A tribute to women. Observations of his world. A patience, repetition. Breathing life into wood. Or rather, a drawing out of the soul already within. A call—and response—that cannot be repeated.
KA: He said, Madam, you don’t know what went on into that work. It cannot be repeated. He said, It’s twelve years now, he’s working on that. You know? He thought it just . . . appeared.
RBR: The way I see it, it’s not just an object that has a certain appearance and shape. It must carry with it . . . the charge of your life. Whatever you were experiencing at any of those moments.
KA: Sculpture takes a very long . . . takes life. Sculpture takes a lifetime. This sculpture like this, I’ve been working on it for so long that it has become antique. Sculpture takes you through a journey.
NA: Mm hm. It is a journey.
Kofi Agorsor (KA) – Robin Beth Riskin (RBR) – Nyornuwofia Agorsor (NA)
– Curatorial text by Robin Beth Riskin
Installation Views
