Jimmy Nwanne
What Lies Within
16 May - 10 June 2025
Temple Muse introduces an ongoing salon series dedicated to art, conversation and contemporary African expression. The first edition, What Lies Within, features new works by artist Jimmy Nwanne exploring texture, emotion and the unseen language within material and form. This salon explores the relationship between life, identity and migration as portraiture or composition using materials like oil and charcoal.
Curated by Temple Muse, this collection of artworks captures different emotional aspects of human experience; love and affection, ambition, desire, laughter, self-awareness etc. The artworks are presented in two different media; charcoal on aquarelle paper and acrylic on canvas.
"In my practice the piece of cardboard stuck on canvas around the ear is a metaphor for the artwork as a box that holds more than is seen, thus it has to be unpacked"
Jimmy Nwanne
Slideshow
Kenny draws inspiration from nature and the observances of life around him, and that is what he aims to portray through his deeply moving work; whether as bronze sculptures or as sketches. He attributes his artistic style to an accidental discovery through continuous experimentation and playful exploration which over time became refined into the self-identifying form it has today.
The intention of combining these different materials, whether as floating patches of shapes or as colours, is to achieve chaos and order, roughness and smoothness, in a manner that will appeal to the tactile sense. The floating piece of cardboard around the ear of the figures is mimicked in paint using acrylic on canvas. The cardboard box is a container used to convey items; hence, it has to be unpacked to reveal what it holds within.
Nwanne's use of a piece of cardboard stuck on canvas around the ear in his work is a reminder that the artwork could be unpacked also by listening. As a material the piece of cardboard adds shape, colour, texture and it provides a surface to draw on.
Jimmy Nwanne
Jimmy Nwanne studied fine arts at the Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka Nigeria, with a major in painting. He has exhibited his works in Denmark, Germany and Nigeria. Nwanne’s works looks at the relationship between life, identity and migration. The freedom to make a composition, a portraiture, by rearranging the natural place of something into another, in order to communicate an idea is what is being explored.
The different subjects and objects function as symbols or motifs that represent an idea and they are used to make associations to different aspects of life, the interplay between them almost suggests the feeling of overlap or cut and paste. How everything will come together to create a dialogue and evoke a feeling from the viewer is the object of search.