Shifting Paradigms: The Work of George Edozie

The show, Shifting the Paradigm is designed to tear down aging but still prevalent concepts surrounding the creation, consumption and interpretation of contemporary art. George Edoize (b. 1972, Nigeria) trained as a painter and has always worked as a painter, in his paintings on canvas he normally applies raw colours on the cloth and works them with the knife. The play between surface, colour and texture is central to his work.

For curator Pr. Nkiru Nzegwu, “through form, color, design consciousness, and containment, artistic endeavor unleashes the embodied powers of life to dissolve blockages and remake reality”.

While George Edozie is not an expressionist, he shares a good number of the formal characteristics of the “fauvist” and “post-impressionist” painters at the turn of the 20th century: Cezanne, Matisse, Gauguin, Van Gogh. In different ways, these artists went beyond the manner in which impressionism focused on reproducing the impression caused by the physical world.

Shifting the Paradigm draws attention to the occurrence of a millennial shift of the epistemological paradigm of art conceptualization and interpretation. This new paradigmatic shift opens the world to a new way of thinking and being. Through form, color, design consciousness, and containment, artistic endeavor unleashes the embodied powers of life to dissolve blockages and remake reality.

As empowered metaphors in the newly defined space, works, such as those of George Edozie, define an enduring state of being that approximates true creativity.