Victoria Miro is delighted to present Incroci del Passato (Crossroads of the Past), an exhibition of paintings by Richard Ayodeji Ikhide commenced during a recent residency with the gallery in Venice.
Working in egg tempera on panel for the first time, the artist seeks to bridge artistic traditions ranging from the devotional paintings of the Italian Renaissance to the ritual objects and ancestral knowledge of his Nigerian heritage. Archetypal figures emerge – parents, children, seekers, holy families – each inhabiting charged symbolic landscapes where the sacred, the ancestral and the personal intersect.

Ikhide began experimenting with the medium, learning to mix his own paints from egg yolk and pigment, while studying depictions of hermit saints and early tempera works by Italian painters such as Carlo Crivelli. A period of seclusion away from his own family shaped a series of deeply personal works that explore the balance between devotion and self-discovery.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new text, entitled Maestri, by Dr Minna Moore Ede.

Source: Victoria Miro Venice