Nadine Ijewere: Anthesis
27 October – 25 November 2023
HUXLEY-PARLOUR
3-5 Swallow Street
London W1B 4DE
Anthesis is the first solo UK exhibition of photographer Nadine Ijewere. Ijewere is known for her innovative and disruptive approach to fashion photography. The exhibition traces the radical fusion of genres across the artist’s work.
The photographs inhabit the intersection of traditional fashion imagery with street photography and studio portraiture, while poetically weaving in her own biographically inflected practice. Her work is characterised by how it borrows from, and breaks with, the photographic canon. Ijewere’s work responds to the historically narrow representation of beauty in Western popular culture, and seeks to create a more expansive and multifaceted definition. Through her photographs, Ijewere provides an alternative model of visibility.
The exhibition comprises a suite of thirteen large-scale colour photographs, drawn from four years of work between 2019 and 2023. Sensual and intimate, the works are representative of Ijewere’s command of colour as well as an experimental treatment of composition.
Ijewere’s focus on tonality and the tactile is complimented by a practice that maintains a painterly focus on abstraction through form and patternation. Ijewere uses these tools to further dissolve the boundaries between photographic genres, using the tactile qualities of textile and setting to playfully world-build.
Nadine Ijewere (born 1992) studied photography at the London College of Fashion. In 2019 she was the first woman of colour to shoot the cover of British Vogue. She accomplished the same achievement for American Vogue in 2021. Ijewere’s work has been featured in the group exhibitions The Tate Britain Generation exhibition in 2016, and The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion at Saatchi Gallery, London, in 2022. Her first solo exhibition, Beautiful Disruption, was held at C/O Berlin in 2021.
She received the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in 2020 and in 2022 she was awarded the Royal Photographic Society’s Award for Editorial, Advertising and Fashion Photography. Her first monograph, Our Own Selves, was published in 2021 by Prestel Publishing.
©2023 Nadine Ijewere
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