Notes

In 1993, Serge Alain Nitegeka fled the conflict in Burundi for Rwanda with his family. After periods in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Kenya, he settled in Johannesburg in 2003. Nitegeka is interested in the poetics of displacement, and repeatedly uses industrial wood and black paint to create abstract formalist works that address notions of fracture, adaptation, and survival in the context of forced migration. This lot was first exhibited in a room dominated by a large-scale installation composed of interlocking lengths of wood. Operating both as threshold and obstacle, Nitegeka’s archi-sculptural interventions demand the active participation of viewers. They spatialise in three dimensions the artist’s formal concerns in his paintings, while making palpable the physical experience of displacement.

Notwithstanding the emphasis placed on his refugee status in appraisals of his work, Nitegeka’s hard-edge paintings operate in a context, South Africa, where formal innovation has long been matched by flagrant copying. South African critics have consistently drawn comparisons between Nitegeka’s meticulously fabricated compositions and Piet Mondrian’s grid paintings.¹ Kazimir Malevich is also referenced. While his kinship with these ancestors is self-evident, Nitegeka's work is better viewed in relation to Erik Laubscher’s abstract compositions from the late 1950s, which featured interlocking forms in a reduced palette of black, red, and yellow.

Curator and art historian Adrienne Edwards’s recent writing about blackness as material, method and mode in abstraction are also pertinent.² Nitegeka has used black throughout his career. The colour dominates his work, and is its meaning. Nitegeka credits the soil in a refugee settlement near Mount Nyiragongo, near Goma in the DRC, with initiating his fascination. Wandering barefoot around the encampment, Nitegeka would marvel at how the grey-black volcanic soil covered his limbs like a sock, hiding wounds and wear. Nitegeka’s paintings metabolise the raw information of experience into an allusive visual poetry.³

^1. Percy Mabandu (2014) ‘Review: Serge Alain Nitegeka at Stevenson in Johannesburg’, Artthrob, 20 August: https://artthrob.co.za/2014/08/20/into-the-black/
^2. Adrienne Edwards (2015) ‘Blackness in Abstraction’, Art in America, 5 January: https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/blackness-in-abstraction-3-63053/
^3. Sean O'Toole (2020) ‘Crisis of Identification’, ARTnews, Summer. Page 99.

Johannesburg-based, Burundian-born artist Serge Alain Nitegeka works in painting and sculpture – including large site-specific installations that promote participation. His art references issues of identity, culture, and politics as influenced by forced migration, which he experienced as a refugee from Burundi. Nitegeka’s works are minimalist and abstract, often featuring bold black lines and geometric forms.

Nitegeka achieved his BFA in 2009 from the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. His accolades include a grant award from The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation (2019); the Villa Extraordinary Award for Sculpture from the Claire and Edoardo Villa Will Trust (2018); and the Tollman Award for Visual Arts (2010). He has exhibited extensively since 2008, most recently a solo exhibition, Finding Black (2022), at Stevenson, Cape Town, and a group exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France, entitled Ubuntu, a lucid dream (2021 to 2022).

Provenance

Stevenson, Johannesburg, 2012.

Cotton Tree Collection.

Exhibited

Stevenson, Johannesburg, Black Lines, 1 to 30 March 2012.