Drawing as a sculptural medium.
This book is published on the occasion of Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze's first solo show in Italy, and presents the projects that took shape in the rooms of Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia. Exploring the relationship between bodies and space, Amanze experiments with multiple techniques and supports that allow her to exceed the two-dimensional nature of the sheet and transform the drawing into a sculptural medium. The fifteen sheets of paper that extended over the entire height and width of Collezione Maramotti's walls—here generously documented through brilliant photography—open a door into her suspended architectural universe and its recurring population of hybrid characters. In this multilayered panorama, Amanze constantly engages the viewer. She is one who draws but also one who dances; indeed, she captured and engaged the gaze in a performance organized at Collezione Maramotti in June 2021.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, in 2021.
Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze (born 1982 in Port-Harcourt, Nigeria) is a Philedelphia-based artist of Nigerian descent and British upbringing whose creative practices and processes focus on producing mixed media, paper-based
drawings and works. Her art draws inspiration from photography, textiles, architecture and print-making.
Amanze's practice builds around questions of how to create drawings that maintain paper's essence of weightlessness. The large-scaled and multi-dimensional drawings are part of an ongoing, yet non-linear narrative that employ the malleability of space as the primary antagonist.
A nameless, self-imagined, chimeric universe has simultaneously been positioned between nowhere and everywhere. Using a limited palette of visual elements, including ada the Alien, windows and birds, Amanze's drawings create a non-narrative and expansive world. The construction of this world is largely centered around an interest in the spatial negotiations found in the three dimensional practices of dance, architecture and design.
