Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia (she/her)
Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia’s practice of large-scale installations of oil paintings explores how the dynamics between people are shaped by what appears to be real and the possibilities of fiction. The immersive triptychs implicate the viewers and their bodies into the setting in order to emphasise and discomfort the connection between the spectator, painting, and subject. Once situated within the walls of washi paper the spectator is caught within a network of relations which are defined by histories that interfere with and charge their interactions. The arrangement of her works simulates the psychological landscape of the painting’s narrative and her distortion of the visual field makes the viewer’s relationship to the painting perceptible as their observation becomes based on movement.
Her work is inspired by the practice of researching history: understanding how subjectivity creates contradictions in the narration of events. She draws on psychological, literary and historical analysis of fiction to construct and play out refuted experiences. The compositions, photomontages and entanglements of historical and popular images and narratives, focus on the elements affecting the character’s behaviours. The layers of paint and narratives intertwine fables and falsehoods – allegories emerge and retreat.
Onwochei-Garcia (Spanish-British) is a figurative painter and installation artist based in the UK. Elena completed a Figurative Oil Painting Diploma in Rome whilst reading History and Art History BA at Durham University. She has featured in group exhibitions Short Lapses, Long Rolls, in Saltspace Glasgow, Royal British Society of Artists Rising Starts of 2022, English Heritage’s national exhibition, Painting our Past: The African Diaspora in England, at the Corbridge Museum and The Africa Centre in London 2021, and Quantos A4 cabem no Á-Quatro in Barreiro, Lisbon, 2020, amongst others. Onwochei-Garcia was recently shortlisted for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2023 and is the 2021 recipient of the Leverhulme Master of Fine Art Bursary.
Contact
Dramas de Honor
In the exchange between these paintings, the relationship between those who act within this world and those that overlord it, is being challenged and redrawn, creating zones of tension and distention in social time. The dynamic between the actors, audience and their founding myth takes from the framework of sixteenth-century Spanish drama plays, where the highly schematised facade of reality narrows the orbit of human possibility and behaviour.
“¡Silencio!”
The triptych explores how dynamics replicate themselves through generations and how the insularity of those relationships affirms and conditions their nature. The series draws on Garcia Lorca’s play La Casa de Bernarda Alba, a world which is exclusively governed by negation in its many forms: rejection, emptiness, sterility, absence of sensation, loneliness, seclusion and denial.
