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Mederic Turay – Abandoned Memories

9 July 2021 – 25 September 2021

Bloom Galerie is pleased to present Abandoned Memories, an exhibition of works by painter Mederic Turay. This is Mederic Turay’s first solo show with Bloom Galerie.

Ivory Coast-born artist Mederic Turay was raised in the United States in the 1990s, where he was introduced to hip hop music, graphic novels, and the works of Picasso, Van Gogh, and Basquiat. He returned to the Ivory Coast as an adult to attend art school, and travelled widely in Africa in search of source materials and inspiration. Turay’s incandescent, vast canvases offer beguiling storylines of his global background and represent his effort to distill, through the performative physicality of painting, the essence of the contemporary human experience in Africa and our post-colonial global society. Turay’s concept of “human with a capital H” is one that transcends racial, geographic and socio-political stereotypes. Instead of fetishizing western models and blaming corrupt politicians, he believes Africa must instead look inward to study its abandoned traditions and history to reclaim its glory from the roots.

A descendant of the noble Akan people of West Africa, Turay seeks to connect with his heritage by appropriating motifs such as ancestral masks and spiritual symbols. His new body of work is more abstract and introspective, assembling coarse coffee grinds, oil and acrylic brushstrokes, and locally sourced pigments to create raw, cacophonous canvases with hypotonic textures. His saturated images require viewers to suspend their imagination to attempt to decode an ineffable, hypnotic expanse of inherited traditions and new forms, and contemplate the foundational ingredients of human identity and the nature of geopolitical power. These experimental images also document Turay’s quest to seek truth and proclaim the power and necessity of painting in this global, mass media age. 

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The new works in this exhibition represent significant leaps in Turay’s formal and conceptual ambitions. A lush celebration of life flows through three canvas in a representation of a traditional spiritual dance in Deep Blue Turay’s first triptych.  A color steeped in art history, blue for Turay evokes Planet Earth’s chromatic identity and is a symbol of infinity and life. The intense, clear ultramarine shades are achieved using majorelle, a natural pigment from Marrakkech’s markets. The dance is a traditional way of communication, and the storyline wades through geometric symbols that present purified emotions.  In Heaven with tears, the same blue is obscured by earthy textures and neutral paints. This work captures the exuberant human joy Turay saw on his research trips in African villages, whose inhabitants are deemed by mainstream society to be suffering in hellish misery due to their poverty. The symbolic blue cannot stay saturated due to a lack of material means, yet the image demonstrates a more sublime spiritual heaven. 

Turay is deliberate and outspoken about his solutions for curing Africa’s status as the world’s poorest continent whose potential is going to waste due to emigration and misguided priorities. Blue Rise and Fall, is inspired by Turay’s experience growing up in the United States, where he realized, from a distance, Africa’s desperate need for patriotism.  The work celebrates Africa’s past glory with feverish urgency, and insists that its current low ebb is merely a stage in a natural and perpetual cycle. Layering hazy, starry figures painted with coffee and sharp acrylic strokes, Turay creates a rapturous sea of emotions. In Land of Shipwreck, ocean-like blue pools over a dense layer of vertical and horizontal lines that reference facial scars used for tribal identification. Africa is besieged by oceans, and there exists an inextricable link between seawater and displacement. To the left of the painting, an image of a traditional western African sculpture is jettisoned and surrounded by figures of drowning people who prefer the risk of death over rebuilding Africa. Roots of Life turns its attention to the color red, the color of active blood and the energetic continuity of life. An abstract tree pulsates through the large canvas; its meandering branches search for balance and liberation, and suggest that humans are the sole source of our society’s disappointments. More realistically rendered animal and botanical motifs are included as witnesses of the raw vibrations of spiritual momentum Turay aims to depict. 

Selected works

Slide Name Project Selected Images - 1 of 7 arrow_forward_ios arrow_back_ios Philip Guston
1975
Oil on canvas
122.5 x 178.4 cm
© Philip Guston
Slide Name Project Selected Images - 2 of 7 arrow_forward_ios arrow_back_ios Philip Guston
1975
Oil on canvas
122.5 x 178.4 cm
© Philip Guston
Roots of life I

Slide Roots of Life I, 2020 Selected works - 1 of 19 arrow_forward_ios arrow_back_ios Mederic Turay
Mixed media on canvas 244 x 344 cm
Slide Deep Blue, 2020 Selected works - 2 of 19 arrow_forward_ios arrow_back_ios Mederic Turay
Mixed media on canvas 200 x 300 cm
Slide Blue Rise, Blue Fall, 2020 Selected works - 3 of 19 arrow_forward_ios arrow_back_ios Mederic Turay
Mixed media on canvas
170 x 270 cm
Slide For Better or Worse, 2021 Selected works - 4 of 19 arrow_forward_ios arrow_back_ios Mederic Turay
Mixed media on canvas
200 x 200 cm
Slide Land of Shipwreck, 2021 Selected works - 5 of 19 arrow_forward_ios arrow_back_ios Mederic Turay
Mixed media on canvas
150 x 200 cm
Slide Initiation Night, 2021 Selected works - 6 of 19 arrow_forward_ios arrow_back_ios Mederic Turay
Mixed media on canvas
150 X 150 cm
157.5 x 157.5 cm framed
Slide The Separation, 2021 Selected works - 7 of 19 arrow_forward_ios arrow_back_ios Mederic Turay
Mixed media on canvas
150 x 150 cm
157.5 x 157.5 cm framed
Slide Weight of The Past, 2020 Selected works - 8 of 19 arrow_forward_ios arrow_back_ios Mederic Turay
Mixed media on canvas
150 x 150 cm
157.5 x 157.5 cm framed
Slide Dust of Memory, 2021 Selected works - 9 of 19 arrow_forward_ios arrow_back_ios Mederic Turay
Mixed media on canvas
150 x 150 cm
157.5 x 157.5 cm framed
Slide Heaven with Tears, 2021 Selected works - 10 of 19 arrow_forward_ios arrow_back_ios Mederic Turay
Mixed media on canvas
150 x 150 cm
157.5 x 157.5 cm framed
Slide Troubled Youth, 2021 Selected works - 11 of 19 arrow_forward_ios arrow_back_ios Mederic Turay
Mixed media on canvas
100 x 100 cm
107 x 107 cm framed
Slide Fairy Tales, 2020 Selected works - 12 of 19 arrow_forward_ios arrow_back_ios Mederic Turay
Mixed media on canvas
100 x 100 cm
107 x 107 cm framed
Slide Primitive Spirits, 2021 Selected works - 13 of 19 arrow_forward_ios arrow_back_ios Mederic Turay
Mixed media on canvas
100 x 100 cm
107 x 107 cm framed
Slide Silent Youth, 2021 Selected works - 14 of 19 arrow_forward_ios arrow_back_ios Mederic Turay
Mixed media on canvas
100 x 100 cm
106 x 106 cm framed
Slide Kanaga III, 2021 Selected works - 15 of 19 arrow_forward_ios arrow_back_ios Mederic Turay
Oil, Acrylic on metal
161 x 50 x 34 cm
Slide Kanaga II, 2021 Selected works - 16 of 19 arrow_forward_ios arrow_back_ios Mederic Turay
Oil, Acrylic on metal
161 x 50 x 34 cm
Slide Karama I, 2021 Selected works - 17 of 19 arrow_forward_ios arrow_back_ios Mederic Turay
Oil, Acrylic on metal
161 x 51 x 33.5 cm
Slide Karama III, 2021 Selected works - 18 of 19 arrow_forward_ios arrow_back_ios Mederic Turay
Oil, Acrylic on metal
155 x 50.5 x 33.5 cm
Slide Totem Charmer II Selected works - 19 of 19 arrow_forward_ios arrow_back_ios Mederic Turay
Oil, Acrylic on metal
161 x 45 x 33 cm

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