Opening Kunstverein Jesteburg: Ngoye – Between the Forms

Galerie Melbye-Konan is pleased to announce the exhibition “Entre les formes / Zwischen den Formen” by Ivorian artist Jean N’Goran Kouamé (Ngoye) at Kunstverein Jesteburg, realized in close collaboration with the gallery.

 

Ngoye belongs to a generation of contemporary artists who are re-examining the possibilities of painting between figuration and abstraction. His works emerge through multilayered processes combining oil and mixed media, in which lines, traces of color, and gestural movements form dense pictorial fields. Mask-like faces initially appear as recognizable forms in his paintings, yet gradually dissolve into a network of color, structure, and movement. In this way, figuration and abstraction enter into a dynamic tension, where the image does not present itself as a fixed representation but as an open process.

The mask-like forms allude to visual traditions from Côte d’Ivoire; however, in Ngoye’s painting they do not function as ethnographic signs. Instead, they become unstable figures within an abstract pictorial space. This shift reflects a broader movement in contemporary painting, in which visual traditions circulate globally, becoming layered, reinterpreted, and transformed.

 

For the exhibition at Kunstverein Jesteburg, Ngoye’s painting is presented for the first time as a spatial installation. Large-scale wall prints of fragments from the artist’s paintings extend across parts of the exhibition architecture, while original canvases are installed over them. This creates layered situations in which image and space merge, allowing the viewer’s gaze to move between proximity and distance and to discover new levels of perception.

The exhibition approaches Ngoye’s works as dynamic visual fields in which forms, meanings, and perceptions are constantly reconfigured. Between figuration and abstraction, surface and space, an open pictorial process unfolds that makes the possibilities of contemporary painting strikingly visible.

 

The exhibition is curated by Isa Katharina Hänsel, director of Kunstverein Jesteburg.

 

Opening:
21 March 2026, 3 pm

 

Kunstverein Jesteburg
Hauptstraße 37
21266 Jesteburg