Exhibition Details

Aicon is proud to present Looking Back and Forward, the third solo exhibition of Nigerian-American artist Victor Ekpuk at our New York gallery.
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.
 
In Ekpuk’s conceptualisation 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.