WONDERS SHALL NEVER END

Edozie Anedu WONDERS SHALL NEVER END

The Melrose Gallery

The Melrose Gallery is currently hosting Edozie Anedu’s latest solo titled ‘Wonders Shall Never End’. The exhibition features a series of paintings created in 2022 and follows on from his wellreceived show with Unit London in 2021. The exhibition runs until the 15 August and online on a viewing room at www.themelrosegallery. com until 30 August 2022.

Edozie Anedu is a lyrical modernist whose spirited colour palette the artist subjects to exhilarating experiments which draw from diverse, design principles. In Wonders Shall Never End — his first solo exhibition in South Africa — the Nigerian born artist has furthered his obsessive recombination of sources to critique the totalising effect of digitisation, religious observance, self reflexivity and art historical ordinance.

The Angelus paintings make up a triptych whose preoccupation with solitude, devotion and catholic religiosity is demonstrated by formal ebullience in Anedu’s approach to perspective, spatial coherence and colour action. This inquiry is continued in Les Comediens Presents the Last Supper (2022), a metamodernist interpretation of Eucharist ritual vividly rendered in the artist’s signature scrawls and sketches.

In previous iterations, Anedu’s recurring motif of an outsized sketched head was revivified with abstracted palace wall plaques from ancient Benin and the skeletonised base plate and armature of luxury watches. In three specially created works for Melrose Gallery — Abacus Head, Search Engine I and Search Engine II — this abiding motif has been retooled as avatars of the digital age and its endless perfection of problem solving systems.

Screensaver 2022 and Counter Attack 2022 are dramatic self-portraits densified with zestful brushwork and a true sense of mischief, as is true of the majority of Anedu’s figural dissolutions. Combined with his distribution of asymmetric colours and geometric rigour, Anedu’s distinct graphic language marks him out as one of the most promising, emergent painters on the continent.

Above: Ocean divider (Moses), 2022, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 190 x 194 x 5 cm. Opposite Page: (deatil) Search Engine I, 2022, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 190 x 180 cm

Les Comediens presents the Last Supper, 2022, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 147 x 190 x 3 cm

Abacus Head, 2022, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 190 x 180 x 5 cm

Carol Cauldwell A FRECKLE PAST A HARE

The Melrose Gallery

Stargazer Frogs, Bronze 96 x 72 x 65 cm, Edition of 15

We take pleasure in presenting A Freckle Past a ‘Hare’, Carol Cauldwell’s first solo with The Melrose Gallery, on the 3 to 28 August as part of our Womxn’s Month celebrations.

Definition of ‘A Freckle Past a Hair’ Said when asked the time, humorously indicating that one does not know or does not care to check.

Carol believes that life should not be taken too seriously. The recent pandemic has made that abundantly clear.

She has built a strong following for her whimsical sculptures of animals and people who could have travelled straight from Alice in Wonderland.

This exhibition, presenting over 20 sculptures in Carol’s signature style, including her 6 metre ‘Rabbit’, will be sure to captivate all who experience them.Rabbits, a walrus sea captain, children, dogs and other colourful characters will invite you to ‘jump down the rabbit hole’ with Carol to another world filled with laughter, joy and more than a little bit of carelessness.

For more information contact curator @ themelrosegallery.com or visit www.themelrosegallery.com

Rabbits Dandelion, 2021, Bronze, 77 x 36 x 35 cm, Edition of 15

Walrus, Old Man of the Sea, 2021, Bronze 92 x 42 x 46 cm, Edition of 15