The Blue Flowers

Opening reception: Sunday, November 16, 7:00 pm
First Floor Gallery, Townhouse

"The unknown is an abstraction; the known, a desert; but what is half-known, half-seen, is the perfect breeding ground for desire and hallucination"


Join us on Sunday, November 16, for “The Blue Flowers,” Rundu-based researcher Immanuel Amunue's first solo exhibition

Over the past decade, Amunue has created a dense body of research that combines such varied elements as post-Internet art, computer-generated poetry, desert studies, Brazilian neo-abstraction, and a world history of natural disasters. The paintings in this exhibition were extracted from one strand of this ongoing research project, which interrogates the meaning and possibilities of abstract painting

Questioning why abstraction recurs at certain pinnacle moments in western history, Amunue was especially intrigued by mid-20th century geometric abstraction in North and South America. However, he was unable to travel and see these paintings in person. He began copying the works himself based on digital images found through Google image search, both as a form of note-taking and out of a personal desire to experience the images in a material form

When he was invited to show his paintings at Townhouse, Amunue asked the gallery’s staff to take the paintings into the desert, photograph them, and exhibit the resulting images, as well. The painting thus returns to the digital realm from which his copy was extracted. Amunue suggests that each iteration of the image (the inaccessible “original” painted by the artist, the digital image found on Google, his copy, his copy sitting in the desert, and finally the digital photograph of his copy sitting in the desert) is equally as real as any other version of the image