Herald St

Vamba Bility

Quatre Poteau

Bologna | Via Valdonica, 14, 40126 Bologna

18 September – 21 November

Preview: Friday 18 September, 5–7pm

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Vamba Bility’s practice incorporates techniques of oil painting, knitting, weaving, sculpture, installation and sound into works that ruminate on interiority and materials shaped by his upbringing in West Africa – between Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea with ties to Liberia, and coastal New England in the United States. In his works, Bility treats stitching, weaving, tearing, burning and assembling as forms of mark-making, often exposing raw canvas and parts of the substrate beneath. He is interested in the tension between binary definitions of painting and sculpture, and why with different gestures ‘certain marks feel legible and others feel illegible’. The works simultaneously gesture towards avant-garde practices of the 1960s and 1970s, such as the Italian Arte Povera movement, while also connoting West African sensibilities and strategies of Vohou-Vohou and récupération. Bility has described his process as ‘a philosophical quest that sits within the poesis of the everyday’ and curator Ikechúkwú Onyewuenyi has observed that Bility’s works echo the texts of writers including Alice Walker, Paule Marshall and Toni Morrison in that they are ‘sensual, abstract, beautiful, and communicative.’

Vamba Bility (b.1990, Côte d'Ivoire; lives and works in New York, US) received his BFA in Textiles from Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University School of Art, where he was awarded the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for excellence in painting. He has served as a critic and lecturer at Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University School of Art since 2023. In 2024, Bility received a solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, US.

Text by Laurie Barron