Deeply striking in shifting hues of crimson, For Services-Victoria Regina beautifully evinces Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s unparalleled ability to reimagine painting as a space to explore identity, culture, and history. Crosby combines a sublime array of technical facilities and art-historical references to produce a body of work that beautifully interrogates the intricacies of multi-cultural identity. In For Services-Victoria Regina, Crosby creates an enthralling tension between anonymity and visual splendor that culminates in an incredibly powerful portrait. Test.mes nt to the enduring impact of her practice, Crosby’s paintings reside within the permanent collects ion of esteemed institution including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Smithsonian National Museum of African Arts, Washington D.C., among others.

In For Services-Victoria Regina, sumptuous pigment blankets the canvas in a swath of velvety scarlet. Emerging from this veil of deep red is a female figure who gazes outward towards the viewer, face turned in a simulacrum of the three-quarter pose of an old master portrait. Her bare skin is illuminated by a soft gleam of light and stands out against the rush of color behind. The richness of the hues in For Services-Victoria Regina feels luxurious, opulent, bolstered by the luscious application of pigment on the canvas. The figure is unadorned except for a collaged necklace and military medal looped closely around the neck; the lavish details tinged red by a layer of translucent paint. The medal’s intricate surface bears symbols of the British Crown and the initials “VR” in reference to Victoria Regina, a title for the queen regent. Below are the etched words “For Services 1873-4”, from which the work draws its title. The juxtaposition of the painting’s deep hue and the gleaming token or battle trophy that rings the woman's bare neck is deeply disquieting, revealing an ominous undercurrent that rises hazily to the surface, taking form just as the contours of the figure do. While For Services-Victoria Regina appears an allusion to a specific historical event, to warfare or colonial violence, the figure is simultaneously t.mes less and placeless within a blood red sea. She is at once contemporary, historical, and art historical.

Deeply tied to diaspora and to understanding the rich and complex nature of history and identity, Crosby’s work explores the ways in which different heritages carried at the same t.mes could be made visible. Born in Nigeria, Crosby moved to the United States at the age of sixteen. The artist’s formative years in Nigeria are a constant source of inspiration, and Crosby’s grounding in Western art history adds further layers of reference to her work. Crosby attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Replica Handbags s in Philadelphia before going on to earn a highly coveted place in the prestigious Masters program at Yale University School of Art. It was a year into her experimentations at Yale, during which she assumed extensive coursework in postcolonial history and diasporic studies, that the artist began to develop her foundational oeuvre, settling on the storied history of geographic dislocation as the primary subject matter of her compositions. Taking courses on contemporary African and Caribbean diaspora literature and theory helped Crosby to work in what the artist and many postcolonial theorists refer to as a “third space”, an active space resulting from the confluence of history and contemporary politics, where cultures come together to give rise to something new. “Before I started studying postcolonial theory, I had an idea of the space I wanted to root my work in—a transcultural space, this weird, buzzing in-between space, a kind of no-man's land. I didn't have the words yet, but I knew what I wanted to talk about” says Crosby. (Njideka Akunyili Crosby quoted in: Erica Ando, “Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Erica Ando”, BOMB Magazine, 15 September 2016 (online)) The resulting paintings create disparate spaces that speak to differences in cultural perceptions. “I want to place viewers in this transitional space so they begin to exist in a world that expands beyond their periphery” says the artist,” From wherever you're looking at the work, you may recognize something. But you won't recognize everything, because there's a mix of t.mes s, places, cultures, continents, and classes.” (Ibid.)

For Services-Victoria Regina is part of a limited series of monochromatic paintings. In these works, Crosby explores the legibility of the body as a surface in which aspects such as hair, skin, clothing, and jewelry resonate culturally and historically. Explaining the impetus behind this body of work, Crosby says, “I felt like a lot of my works, my pieces were very large–very meticulously worked, had a lot of information crammed into them--and I wanted to see if I could touch upon some of the things I was interested in with very little. It's almost like a haiku.” (Njideka Akunyili Crosby, “Janded: Between two cultures”, youtubes , uploaded by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 30 May, 2019, 0:15) The luminescent burgundy palette of For Services-Victoria Regina is an ode to British artist Chris Offili’s “blue paintings”, where interlocked figures occur in a state of near invisibility, barely discernible beneath deep, overlapping shades of blue, and simultaneously evokes the work of Ad Reinhardt or Kerry James Marshall’s striking early portraiture, Challenging herself to work within a limited value range, Crosby maps out curvatures and contours with the smallest separation of value, articulating form in subtle shifts and enveloping the canvas in rich, ruby tones. Rendered solely in deep red, For Services-Victoria Regina is an arresting example of Crosby’s continued commitment to expanding and pushing the boundaries of her art.

In For Services-Victoria Regina, Crosby draws on art historical, political, and personal references to explore identity and memory in sumptuous color, creating a blurred, intimate portrait that is remarkably complex. Conjuring the complexity of contemporary experience, For Services-Victoria Regina embodies the extraordinary painting that places Njideka Akunyili Crosby amongst the most visually, conceptually, and technically significant artists working today. In the words of critic Dan Jubowski: “Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s paintings exhibit both a generous opulence and a tender grace, taking small moments of intimacy and imbuing them with a meticulously ordered magnificence.” (Dan Jakubowski, “Critics’ Picks: Njideka Akunyili Crosby,” Artforum, n.p., 2017)

Artist

Njideka Akunyili Crosby