MARUANI MERCIER is pleased to announce worldwide representation of Ghanaian artist Emmanuel Taku (b. 1986). Taku’s first solo exhibition with the gallery will take place in MARUANI MERCIER’s Knokke space from 3rd April to 15th May 2021, where he will present new works made during his recent residency at Noldor in Accra, Ghana.
Emmanuel Taku: The Chosen Few
In his new body of work, Emmanuel Taku (b. 1986) presents ethereal large-scale portraits which give form to a new vision of Black identity. Rendered in subtle tones and nuanced brushwork, the subjects’ faces and hands appear almost luminous, projecting a sense of confidence and poise. Turning to the viewer with their gaze replaced by white light, the figures seem supernatural and futuristic, their faces mask-like. Describing his visual language as ‘figurative surrealism’, Taku gives his subjects a mythic, god-like appearance, resolutely challenging the historic modes of portraying Black individuals.
Standing in pairs, Taku’s subjects come together in mutual support, in a kind of brotherhood or sisterhood, to face us with an elegantly coordinated address. The sense of unity between the figures is further exacerbated by the shared patterns of striking intricacy and crispness, which form their clothing. Silkscreened on to the surface of the work, these patterns reflect the artist’s longstanding passion for textiles and prints passed on to him by his mother. Referencing an important role, which patterned fabric have historically played in forming the identity of African nations, Taku here enters in a fascinating dialogue with a number of prominent African and diaspora artists, such as Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Portia Zvavahera.
Enveloped in a light shadow-like contour, the figures seem cut-out and pasted against a sheer monochrome ground. Taku’s strategy here evokes the paintings and installations by the renowned artist Lubaina Himid, who has recently become the first woman of colour to win the Turner Prize (2017). In Himid’s Turner Prize installation Naming the Money (2004, fig. 1), the painted cut-out figures form a kind of theatre set, surrounding the viewer to activate and perform the lost histories of Black individuals. In Taku’s paintings, this technique similarly contributes to the sense of theatrical and performative, powerfully projected by his subjects. Often rendered on soft unstretched mesh or canvas and hung on plywood beams, the paintings physically unfold the image, conjuring a stage-like environment and underscoring the sense of a direct address to the viewer.
Collaging the fragments of newspaper texts directly on to the figures’ skin, Taku presents a poignant meditation on the political subtext of Black portraiture. In Brothers in White (2020), the hands and face of the protagonist are featuring such words as ‘SEE’, ‘SKIN’, ‘MASK’, rendered in small lettering of the magazine print. Taku therefore invites the viewer to take a closer look, in both a figurative and literal sense. Similar to Amoako Boafo, who trained with Taku at the Ghanatta Institute of Art and Design, the artist here presents the black skin as a contested, politicised space, calling to the revision of the ways in which it has been represented and read in the past.
As the artist writes, “This body of work was inspired by British-Ghanaian artist John Akomfrah’s discussion on his perceptions as child that museums presenting works by J. M. W. Turner or John Constable were ‘Temples of Whiteness.’ This notion stuck with me and drove me to aspire for my own ‘Temple of Blackness,’ one that would capture Black people as demi-gods, or heroes. In depicting these Black bodies as abstract, analogous shapes, all-the-more united by their silkscreen casts, I seek to reclaim their anecdotal, objectified representation, instead affirming a shared, universal and strong Black identity.”
