Grace

Nkem

GRACE NKEM
(surname pronounced in-kem or ‘n-kem)

Born 1997 in Tver, Russia
Lives and works in New York City

Artist Bio

Grace Nkem is a Nigerian-Russian painter from Tver who studied Art History at Columbia University and now lives and works in New York City. In her work she grapples with the ills of social alienation, mass digitization, and globalism— ironically noting that she owes her very existence to the latter of the three.

Formally, her paintings are inspired by twentieth and twenty-first century figurative painting, and the internet writ large (where, in the artist's own words, "all images seem to exist at once."). Leaning heavily into luminous, contrasting color palettes and crisp atmospheres, Nkem brings together disparate images through free association, noting that it takes very little prompting for the human eye to dive into metaphor: when objects are put beside one another in a picture, a connection inevitably arises between them. Meaning in her work is thus produced according to both the internal logic of her paintings’ and the social context they are viewed in.

The artist is unabashedly open about her deep interest in late twentieth and twenty first century cultural critics like Ta’Neshi Coates, Mark Fischer, Hito Styerl, Nick Land, and Jean Baudrillard. Nonetheless, rather than produce commentary, her work asks viewers to tease issues out for themselves.

Nkem’s main goal is to produce artwork that rewards sustained attention as she works through themes that weigh heavily upon the modern psyche: mass hysteria, truth and untruth, racial antagonism, class consciousness, the dissolution of consensus reality, the specter of terrorism, compounding loss of cultural history, rampant wealth inequality, the tyranny of the digital, and a cultural preoccupation with perceived social decay.