Untitled (Couple's embrace)
linoleum fixed to wood block
20 x 17.5cm (linoleum)
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Uche Okeke (1933 - 2016) emerged at the twilight of British colonialism and the arrival of political independence in Nigeria, which came in 1960. Okeke, along with a few other artists, then invented a modernist vocabulary that drew from the indigenous aesthetic traditions and worldview of the Igbo, his ethnic group, combining them with his formal exposure to artistic sensibilities from elsewhere in what he termed “natural synthesis.” As a signifier of his importance as an icon of African modernism, his work was recently acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.