EXTRAVAGANT DISSIDENCE - BUILDING A LOCAL PRAXIS: Solo Show: Osvaldo Ferreira

THIS NOT A WHITE CUBE is pleased to present: "Extravagant Dissidence: Building a Local Praxis", a solo show by the Angolan artist Osvaldo Ferreira. The show will be held at Galeria Banco Económico, in Luanda, from September 10th, 2021. 

The project follows his recent award by of one of the most relevant distinctions for the fine arts in Angola - the ENSA Art Grand Prize for painting - and stems from the commitment of the gallery THIS IS NOT A WHITE CUBE and Banco Económico with the development of the contemporary art system in Angola.

The two institutions, through an already long partnership, have been jointly developing, over the years, an in-depth artistic and cultural programming, with a view to creating local support mechanisms and boosting the careers of young artists and their subsequent internationalization. Bringing together 20 new works produced over the past year, "Extravagant Dissidence: Building a Local Praxis" proposes, through representation in painting, the emergence of a new status for the image of contemporary relational staging in the urban space of the Angolan capital.

Through a unique aesthetic construction, marked by the exacerbated use of color, the reinvention of traditional African fabric patterns, and the deconstruction of stereotypes long mediated in the field of painting, Osvaldo Ferreira shows in this exhibition the invisible aspects of a social history woven into the daily life of the city of Luanda. Through a continuous exercise of research, experimentation, and questioning, the author is locally proposing and redefining new paths for figurative art, with forms of representation and images that surprise us by their oppositions and contrasts and which, for this very reason, are integrated into the space of a modernity that has long been in charge of deconstructing traditional aesthetic categories.

Osvaldo Ferreira is exhibiting a body of work that - in drawing, color, composition, the heterodox model for representing the feminine, and in the continuous reinvention of the construction of the scenic space of painting - is affirmed by the freedom of creation, proposing to expand its limits, against aesthetic and social conventions, against academisms in the representation of the world, and in favor of the continuous expansion of the artistic sphere and the construction of a local praxis.

(Graça Rodrigues, Curator, 2021)

The exhibition will be on display  until December 31, 2021. Admission is free, obeying the necessary security and prevention rules in a pandemic context.