Marcia Kure creates drawings, photomontages, and sculptures that explore alternative worlds as a response to colonialism. She has garnered significant attention for her paintings and drawings that are made of the brownish pigment of kola nuts and watercolor.
LDIMEDILLIGAF, LBR and LGR, and The Conformist are all from Kure’s series Fashionable Hybrids. She explained:
“The Fashionable Hybrids series evolved from my Dressed Up series (2009 – 2010), which examined the different bodies and fashion associate with Hip Hop and Victorian/contemporary haute couture—the two modes of dress and the social worlds they invoke in order to dismantle the usual cultural and social boundaries cloth imposes on bodies, and to challenge the ways human beings are defined by what they where. The Fashionable Hybrids series goes even further. In the Fashionable Hybrids series, visual elements from Disney cartoons, Japanese anime and manga, medieval fashion, militaries outfits, and contemporary couture fashion collide with pictorial forms inspired by the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, Roy Lichtenstein, Jan Vermeer, Gustav Klimt, Dominique Ingres, and Edouard Manet. The resulting figures, revel in their hybridity, as if they are proud avatars of extreme fashion.”
Kure is a member of the Nsukka School of the University of Nigeria. Members of the school are influenced by ancient cave drawings in southern Africa and uli. Uli is a painting and drawing tradition incorporating simple forms and minimal use of color, which was once solely practiced by the Igbo women of eastern Nigeria. The solitary, amorphous, surreal yet commanding figures she creates—often adorned in highly inventive attire—explore a host of subjects including glamour, aggression, violence, female authority, identity, and beauty.
