INSIGHT: Week 15 | Chemu Ng'ok

INSIGHT IS A NEW ONLINE PLATFORM PRESENTED BY PIPPY HOULDSWORTH GALLERY, DEBUTING WORK BY A DIFFERENT ARTIST EACH WEEK. NEW WORK MADE DURING LOCKDOWN WILL BE HIGHLIGHTED ALONGSIDE A SHORT VIDEO PRESENTED BY THE ARTIST.

INSIGHT: WEEK 15 | CHEMU NG'OK

Chemu Ng'ok's painting practice explores the power dynamics of human interaction and visualises its effects on the psyche. From individual encounters to relationships created across communities, she paints bodies that multiply in number and shift in scale. These solidify and dissolve as they interact with one another across the canvas. Using bold swathes of colour, thin washes of paint, and wavering fine lines, Ng'ok characterises her forms with a restlessness that visualises the permeable line between public and private, personal and political. The artist draws on personal experience as a black, Kenyan woman, as well as the broader political landscape, encompassing contemporary politics in Nairobi and the longstanding legacy of colonialism. Though the figures of her paintings often draw inspiration from particular people and events, Ng'ok is more interested in the symbolic nature of power. Her imagery evokes a dreamlike atmosphere, where invisible relationships and psychological tensions - forces that imperceptibly shape our reality - take physical form.

'In Ng’ok’s depictions, the bodies of “rioters” are propelled by emotional energy toward something beyond the frame of the painting, though they are not always in complete unison; in paintings of small groups or singular figures, unruly fields of color bleed into and take from each other – signaling the flows of political and intellectual ideas that mobilize us into action.'

M. Neelika Jayawardane, '2018 Triennial: Songs For Sabotage', New Museum, New York

'By combining scenes of conflict and comfort Ng'ok builds intricate psychological portraits that reveal the complexities of societal expectations, all visualised in riotous colour and nimble brushwork.'

Holly Black, Elephant Magazine, 2020

Ng’ok has developed a confidently ebullient Expressionism of layered drawing—faces and figures teeming laterally and in depth—and of flowing brushwork, in deep-toned, plangent colors. 

Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 2018

‘The world of Chemu Ng’ok is a dark and wonderous place. This Kenyan painter’s practice is aesthetically brimming with reverie whilst simultaneously displaying a conceptual realism that is scarcely found in an artist so early in her career.’

Astrid Gebhardt, The Lake, 2017