Collage- Transforming the Found Image
Alexander Ikhide is a multidisciplinary visual artist working in photography, collage (analogue/digital), painting and drawing, exploring ideas of the body as well as a merging of photography and painting to produce mixed-media abstract works on paper.
Through a method of gestural abstraction and mark-making, adapting influences from an abstract expressionist painting tradition alongside ideas and themes from the surrealist movement, utilising disparate sources of material through image juxtapositions as collage, that have origins and roots in pre-colonial African spiritual practices and rituals.
He incorporates African symbols and ideograms that are present in sculptural works, textiles, architecture, woodwork and carvings that carry spiritual, cultural and ritualistic meanings.
A coming together of these influences to formulate a hybridized aesthetic begins to materialise in his works, transforming how African-centred aesthetic traditions that have been relegated to 'primitivism' can be utilised in contemporary discourse and located within the canon of modern art.
