True Love

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: HM Treasury, 1 Horse Guards Road

A man and woman face each other as their bodies float on a bright blue ground, surrounded by a range of manufactured and organic items. Their black skin and lower half of clothing are contrasted with white detailing, highlighted by details rendered in gold and red. Split into three sections, the triptych is centred on the couple’s gaze, with the lateral panels partly mirroring each other. The objects in the composition – which include red roses, pierced human hearts, a torch, a lightbulb, radios, a hair comb and an umbrella – appear as symbols whose associations contribute to viewers’ interpretation of this human encounter.

True Love is a print from a series of paintings commissioned in 2016 by the British film director, Danny Boyle and the South Africa-based youth charity, Dramatic Need. The series responds to testimonies from young people in South Africa who had undergone extreme and highly traumatic life experiences. Their answers became The Children Monologues that were performed at the Old Vic in London, in 2010. Animations of Odedina’s paintings were used as backdrops to performances of the testimonies at Carnegie Hall, New York in late 2017. The paintings and animations formed the exhibition True Love presented at The Department Store in Brixton, in 2018.

Odedina’s highly legible stylistic vernacular has been dubbed ‘Brixton Baroque’, a terminology that references his home of more than twenty years, along with his vocabulary of symbols that are almost like baroque ex-voto charms. He describes them as follows: 

These aren’t abstract, untouchable ideas [...] They are everyday items. These are the things that have power.

He is influenced by a diverse range of creators – Voodoo practitioners from Haiti, the Painters of the Sacred Heart, anonymous African craftsmen – championing those who choose to be makers. His practice seeks to revive and deconstruct quintessential classical themes spanning from ancient Greek to Yoruba mythologies to create a charged dialogue between eras, cultures, and peoples. The stories breaking through the surfaces of his paintings surpass physical borders. They activate a uniquely contemporary conversation that oscillates between life and art, and in the folk tradition, life trumps art. In Odedina’s words:

The struggle is to reconcile bold imagery with ideas about ambiguity or indeterminacy, my intention is to arouse the imagination and heart of the viewer and to detonate ideas in another realm.

Places

Subjects

rose, cherry, man, woman, dress, shirt, trousers, necklace, handbag, tie, headphones, bottle, arrow, lipstick, flashlight, makeup brush, chilli

Materials & Techniques

paper (as artists material), print (as object name), pigment print, digital print, giclée

Artist

Abe Odedina (1960 - )

Title

True Love

Edition

Date

2017

Medium

archival pigment print on paper

Dimensions

height: 72.7 cm; width: 217.0 cm; depth: 5.10 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Ed Cross Fine Art, 2019

Provenance

Ed Cross Fine Art, London UK; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 2019

GAC number

18811