ARTISTS UNDER 30 AT ONE OFF

By margaretta wa gacheru One Off gallery just came up with an ingenious way of generating an artistic buzz while drawing upon the creative resources of both young and older working artists. Calling on them all to take part in a group exhibition entitled simply ‘Under 30’, gallerists carol lees and her assistant Kui Ogonga didn’t just elicit responses from artists in their twenties as one might expect. They also invited more established artists who were over 30 to share works they’d created back when they were actually that age and just beginning to cultivate artistic qualities that would lead to their becoming significant figures on the Kenyan art scene today. This is a perfect time to meet the ‘youngsters’, more than 20 young men and women, who brought a wide-ranging variety of works to One Off for Kui and Carol to select the best. Just one among them is a sculptor, Atieno Sachy whose metal ‘Grasshopper’, ‘Samburu’, and ‘Grasshopper’ confirm that she’s a woman to watch. The rest are doing everything from ballpoint pen portraits (‘Shy I’ by Warren Osongo) to hyper-realism (Laban Korer’s Happiness) to surrealism (Dennis Otieno’s ‘Colors’). Anthony Okari’s ‘Building Bridges, Bridging the Gaps’ has a special appeal as the visual representation of the title’s concept is clear-cut. There’s a delicacy in the dangling of colorful diamond-shaped characters who seem to be quietly communicating with other lines of thread for the good of the greater whole.