Aicon is proud to present Looking Back and Forward, the third solo exhibition of Nigerian-American artist Victor Ekpuk at our New York gallery. On the occasion of this exhibition of both new and old paintings and sculpture, Dr. Moyo Okediji offered the following insight into the artist’s practice:

The work of Victor Ekpuk has generated an exciting visual pidginization of culture in contemporary art, as he orchestrates a critical dialogue between his indigenous Ibibio traditional idioms and his adopted Western standards of artistic expressions. 

In the Ibibio tradition, art is defined as Mbre, a term that precisely addresses creativity as play. Mbre, while defined as play, classifies visual objects as part of a larger corpus of creative expressions including music, choreography, literature, installations and performance. 

In Ekpuk’s research into Mbre, he discovered that the visual aspects are principally grounded in sacred Nsibidi forms, which range from cryptic calligraphic writing to elaborate pictorial expressivity with figural forms. 

Nsibidi includes two-dimensional compositions, three-dimensional sculptural configurations, and multi-dimensional installations and performances transformed by mysterious energies connecting human and supernatural forces. 

Ekpuk’s art, however, is not limited by Nsibidi conventions. His creativity, therefore, is not traditional Nsibidi art, which is practiced within strict boundaries and ritualized stipulations by initiates into the secret Ekpe societies of the Ibibio culture. At the same time, Ekpuk’s work is not constricted by western artistic theories that he studied in art schools. 

Among the Ibibio is also the Mwomo House architecture, a tradition of constructing memorial buildings for deceased dignities, using woven and painted textiles as part of the decorative façade of the towering installations. Ekpuk has quoted that tradition in some of his portrait paintings in which he introduces Dutch wax textile prints as chromatic and textural elements. 

In a recently completed painting titled Moondance in Eket, he imposes lineal representations of two Obubom sculptural forms on a background of thick colors, engraved with extemporarily drawn patterns inspired by Nsibidi motifs. The result is a third order of imagination, a visualized pidgin articulation drawing freely from Africa and the West, beyond the limits of both sources. 

In Ekpuk’s conceptualization of contemporary art, he looks back at his Ibibio customs of Mbre, while triangulating Western artistic materials and mediums. The result is a forward-looking practice unfettered by these traditional boundaries and walls, devising imaginative metaphors that envision a fluid future that is illuminating, yet unpredictable, open and opulent.

Dr. Moyo Okediji is a Professor of Art History (African Art, Department of Art and Art History, College of Art, The University of Texas Austin.

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Born in 1964, Victor Ekpuk trained at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, in southwestern Nigeria. He developed his minimalist approach of reducing form while working as a cartoonist for Daily Times, a leading Nigerian newspaper, in the 1990s. While drawing remains a fundamental aspect of his art practices, in recent years, Ekpuk has created large-scale murals, installations, and public art projects. Ekpuk has exhibited at Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, 12th Havana Biennial, Dakar Biennial, The Tang Museum, Fowler Museum, Museum of Art and Design, The World Bank, Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the 1st Johannesburg Biennial. His artworks are in the permanent collections of The Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African Art, The World Bank, Newark Museum, Hood Museum, Krannert Art Museum, United States Art in Embassies Art Collection, and Fidelity Investment Art Collection. In 2023, the Princeton University Art Museum mounted a major exhibition of his works titled Victor Ekpuk, Language and Lineage. 

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