Nnenna Okore at The October Gallery

The October Gallery (London), that indefatigable gallery long committed to the work of African and "black" artists, will host the first solo exhibition in England of the rising Nigerian artist, Nnenna Okore. Okore, assuredly making her mark as a sculptor of tremendous promise, uses fragile, ordinary materials--newspapers, magazines, sticks, clay, etc--to make work of considerable visual and conceptual power. A former student of El Anatsui at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Okore reminds me, in her ability to manipulate fragile media to create sometimes diaphanous but insistently poetic work, of the Cuban post-minimalist and conceptual artist Ana Mendieta who, like Okore was an MFA graduate of the University of Iowa.

I recommend this show.