Pierre Mukeba: Transcend

Guidance/grace flows through like a stream of holy water

/as blue as the shy /as patient as a mother’s love

/ a connection that embodies an unbreakable sustenance, strength protection, power/determination/loyalty/peace/reliability/sensitivity/intelligence/stability)

with a spirit purely linked to the forces of the universe/heaven/ A mother’s love, an unconditional shield.

Pierre Mukeba, 2021

Tiwani Contemporary is pleased to present Transcend - an exhibition by Congolese-Australian artist Pierre Mukeba – marking the first European and UK presentation of his work and on view at arts-hub Cromwell Place in London, SW7 during Frieze Week. 

Transcend features vibrant and frenetic, large-scale charcoal and pastel compositions, and brings together two recent emotionally heady bodies of work: Mental Gymnastics, and Black Emotion, the latter series recently presented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, New South Wales, Australia.

Mukeba addresses themes of spirituality, political and economic unrest as well as representations of Africans in contemporary culture. He weaves stories of the African diaspora, the refugee crisis, displacement, and the trauma of war alongside his experiences of growing up as a Black African male in Australia.  He draws from Christianity, animist belief systems, Kongolese spirituality and sacerdotal ceremony including nkisi masks to produce charged, zoomorphic expositions of interiority. 

In Transcend, the artist presents a series of vivid, totemic compositions featuring a pantheon of transmogrified creatures. Produced rapidly by the artist over a period lasting between 15minutes and 2days, these works represent Mukebas’s free-form oracular explorations likened to “accessing different dimensions” or “dancing and playing in two realms.”  Each work in the exhibition illuminates the inner workings of the artist’s imagination at the time of its composition; each dubbed by the artist to be unplanned, unseen and unmanipulated. The works in the exhibition emerge out of the artist’s connection to unseen, divine forces which the artist sees as ‘momentarily accessible to the hands.’ Fast, protective, complicated, and unbound from artifice, these almost talismanic works address a range of emotions, sensations and abstract ideas including but not limited to grace, sovereignty, power, despondency, determination, loyalty, peace, reliability, sensitivity, intelligence, stability, and love.