Taking place this weekend at Somerset House in London is 1:54, which takes its name from the 54 countries on the African continent. 1:54 provides a showcase for contemporary African art, including works from 100 emerging and established international artists around the world and fills the ground floor galleries in both the east and west wings of Somerset House.
Down below in the basement of the East Wing is an exhibition of work by Lola Frost, the South African artist who now works in London. Lola has exhibited in both South Africa and the UK and she also writes on politics, ethics and aesthetics.
The exhibition of her work entitled Taking Risks is part of her artist’s residency at the War Studies department of Kings College London. Frost is showing her investigation into body and place which “challenge the viewer’s certainty of their own place in the world by disrupting scale, distance and depth of field: one searches in vain for stasis and security.”
“Impressed by the vastness of nature, I was trying to express its expansion, rest and unity. At the same time, I was fully aware that the visible expansion of nature is at the same time its limitation; vertical and horizontal lines are the expression of two opposing forces; these exist everywhere and dominate everything; their reciprocal action constitutes ‘life’. I recognised that the equilibrium of any particular aspect of nature rests on the equivalence of its opposites. I felt that the tragic is created by unequivalence. I saw the tragic in a wide horizon or a high cathedral. (Lola Frost)
“Lola Frost’s paintings are not easy to be with: they draw you in to the detail of their parts whilst at the same time daring you to find a point of rest, a moment of calm. Identifying a place in them where one can assess measurement, or a relationship between inside and outside, is almost impossible. They are at one and the same time an environment that is both micro and macro: the viewer is constantly forced to flip the telescope from one end to the other.” (Jeremy Theophilis)
Her natural-coloured paintings with their intriguing naturalist forms fit well under the exposed brick-arches in the basement of the East Wing.
In Mayfair, the Gallery of African Art (GAFRAART) in Mayfair is showing a retrospective exhibition on the work of Nike Davies-Okundaye, the internationally-known Nigerian artist who creates contemporary designs embedded in traditional crafts and images, as in her hand-painted cloth adire and batiks, quite a contrast to that of Lola Frost.
Perhaps the thing to do is visit the main fair 1:54 for an overview of contemporary African art, then drop down to see Lola Frost’s work and then across to Mayfair to see that of Nike Davies-Okundaye.
