The Melrose Gallery is currently hosting Edozie Anedu’s latest solo titled ‘Wonders Shall Never End’. The exhibition features a series of paintings created in 2022 and follows on from his well-received show with Unit London in 2021. The exhibition runs until 15 August and is online in a viewing room at www.themelrosegallery.com until 30 August 2022.
Edozie Anedu is a lyrical modernist whose spirited colour palette the artist subjects to exhilarating experiments which draw from diverse, design principles. In Wonders Shall Never End — his first solo exhibition in South Africa — the Nigerian-born artist has furthered his obsessive recombination of sources to critique the totalising effect of digitisation, religious observance, self-reflexivity and art historical ordinance.
Abacus Head, 2022, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 190 x 180 x 5 cm
The Angelus paintings make up a triptych whose preoccupation with solitude, devotion and catholic religiosity is demonstrated by formal ebullience in Anedu’s approach to perspective, spatial coherence and colour action. This inquiry is continued in Les Comediens Presents the Last Supper (2022), a metamodernist interpretation of Eucharist ritual vividly rendered in the artist’s signature scrawls and sketches.
In previous iterations, Anedu’s recurring motif of an outsized sketched head was revivified with abstracted palace wall plaques from ancient Benin and the skeletonised base plate and armature of luxury watches. In three specially created works for Melrose Gallery — Abacus Head, Search Engine I and Search Engine II — this abiding motif has been retooled as avatars of the digital age and its endless perfection of problem-solving systems.
Screensaver 2022 and Counter Attack 2022 are dramatic self-portraits densified with zestful brushwork and a true sense of mischief, as is true of the majority of Anedu’s figural dissolutions. Combined with his distribution of asymmetric colours and geometric rigour, Anedu’s distinct graphic language marks him out as one of the most promising, emergent painters on the continent.
Les Comediens presents the Last Supper, 2022, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 147 x 190 x 3 cm
Search Engine I, 2022, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 190 x 180 cm