World Fine Art Professionals and their Key-Pieces, 525 - Joanne Igbuwe

World Fine Art Professionals and their Key-Pieces, 525 – Joanne Igbuwe

For four days, 50 resident artists of the Rijksakademie showed their latest work to the public. One of them was Joanne Igbuwe. I saw beautiful works on glass, inspired by nature and also a number of ceramic objects. And also various flowers, some fresh, some faded, including a thistle bud with sharp points on a long stem on the lower floor of the table, which turned out to have been picked on the grounds of the Rijksakademie.

Her presentation had something earthy, especially because of the chosen colours and at the same time something light and that came from controlled brushstrokes on transparent glass plates. That was reinforced by dried flowers in various places.

Nigerian father and Dutch mother

Joanne (29) grew up in the Netherlands with a Nigerian father and a Dutch mother. She comes from a ‘family of teachers’, she tells me when I visit her after the four-day exhibition. “My mother is a linguist and a language teacher NT2 (Dutch as a second language). She taught Dutch to foreign students, including a young man from Nigeria 35 years ago. We clicked.” The young man was a geologist and currently works as a data analyst and IT manager for NAM (the Dutch Petroleum Company). Her grandfather, her mother’s father, was the principal of a secondary school in Brabant (Deurne). He was very interested in art, including the work of the Van Eyck brothers. Her grandmother was a primary school teacher.

She started photography at the age of 8. “I did it intensively from the age of eight until I was twenty. I still do it. I always thought I would become a photographer. Until I realized that I would be thrown back on myself, while I like to work with people and transfer knowledge. I started focusing on art education and also on making art; I started drawing.”

Eyeopeners (Blikopeners)

She worked for five years at the Stedelijk Museum with the youth program Eyeopeners (Blikopeners), intended to attract more young people to the museum. “They give young people a place in the museum. I became active when the museum reopened after the renovation. I participated in the opening of the new Stedelijk and wrote an opening speech that I presented. I gave many guided tours of works by contemporary artists, I supervised children’s workshops and school groups. I got to know modern art and various artists.”

Among other things, she discovered that she could write texts. “Many of the young people who participated ended up in the creative industry. After that, I did MBO, cultural organization. I met a man at a Eyeopeners (Blikopeners) project in the Stedelijk who told me that art education was my thing. ‘You should go to our school for a visual arts and design course’, which turned out to be the Breitner Academy.”

Breitner Academy

She attended this academy for five years. “I learned to improvise, to start from what you have and then make something of it. I discovered what I was good at: experimenting, teaching and working with groups. At the Breitner Academy I was mainly concerned with making things. I didn’t just want to teach, I also wanted to make things.”

After the Academy, she worked for two years. She was invited to art projects, including in the theater sector. “I mainly did practical work there. In addition, I tried to make my own work.” But it was very stressful, especially about money to be able to pay the high rent.

To Suriname and Cuba

In February 2023, she went to Suriname with two ladies for a project about our country’s colonial past. “We traveled for two and a half weeks, we organized a pop-up studio on a plantation. When we came back, I had three offers for an exhibition, including a Suriname exhibition in the Amstelkerk where I showed drawings I had made in Suriname. In November 2023, I traveled to Cuba for a few weeks with a sketchbook and a camera.

Through the grapevine she happened to hear about the possibility of applying for the Rijksakademie as Artist in Residence. She had visited that academy for years with admiration and jealousy. In Cuba she received an email that she was in the last round of the selection. “They wanted to see new work of mine. What would I have to hand in in terms of extra portfolio? I had made five rolls of film and drawings in Cuba. I locked myself up in a gallery workshop for two weeks to finish that work.

I was accepted! I got a stipend and then a youth house. I can paint four days a week and teach sporadically. I now work with all kinds of museums. When I make something, I combine it with teaching about it. I work for the production house Nowhere, among others.”

Theme

Her work is about being human, curiosity and intimacy, she says. “The body, identity, sexuality and sensuality in combination with material research. I research the body and movement, including hands, that fascinates me. That also applies to flowers and plants, which I work out in my paintings on glass.”

Does Joanne have a key work?

Sure, two even. First of all, the 300 drawings with which she graduated from the Breitner Academy. People could buy it immediately. “Working with paint and ink, watercolors, everything in A3 format. I linked it to a story layer about identity and history. ‘Here all kinds of layers of myself come together’, I thought. I heard that the work was experienced as poetic.”

And in second place the glass works. “It is not only flat work, but also on top of each other, multi-dimensional. Working on glass is funny, it shines through, you have no back and you do have shadow.” The work on glass originated at the Rijksakademie when she started mixing ink on a glass plate. That glass came from the Rijksakademie walkway. Later she found other glass plates elsewhere, of a larger size.

Ceramics

What she also discovered at the Rijksakademie is ceramics. She started scanning hands and printing them onto clay. She succeeded for the umpteenth time. She had the printing done at the clay workshop. ‘What poses do hands take?’, she wondered. She looked at the hands of Greek statues. She examined the hands of her beloved friend and stilled that in ceramics. He has quite large hands, I see. It looks like wood, also because of the colour. You can feel it best with your eyes closed, she says, following Matisse who said ‘When I close my eyes, I see things better than with my eyes open.’

Finally, what is her artistic philosophy?

Joanne has a great interest in material, an obsession with color and a love for conversation and compliments from people who see something in what she makes and how she talks, she begins.

“In my work I seek connection with others, I try to create something that can generate a response. I use the colours of nature. I work based on my image archive.” That archive consists of all kinds of images that she has collected, also from magazines such as ZAM, One World and Geological Magazine (by her father). The history of herbaria and botanical gardens also fits in with that. (“I am a big fan of collector, writer and actor Ramsey Nasr. I have been inspired again by his way of telling and writing.”)

She combined photos of faces from ‘ethnological books’ with the colours and drive of Willem de Koning. After conversations with Mariana Lanari and Arias and an interview she did with Marlene Dumas (already in 2014!) the archive was expanded with emotional images, her and other people’s emotions and experiences. “I am interested in the sensuality and subtlety of life.”

Photo of Joanne and works in her studio by Vere Maagdenberg.

https://www.janneigbuwe.com/
https://www.rijksakademie.nl/en/residents-advisors-team/joanne-igbuwe
https://www.instagram.com/janneigbuwe/
https://inzaken.eu/