Born: 1966 London, England
Biography
Sculptor, filmmaker and photographer, Zak Ové was born in London in 1966 to a Trinidadian father, pioneering black film-maker and photographer, Horace Ové, who had moved to Britain in 1960 and an Irish mother. He grew up within an immediate and extended artistic family, which included many practitioners from the Windrush generation, as a result of which culture, politics and identity were widely discussed topics at home. His visits to Trinidad were a revelation, awakening an interest in the carnival as ‘a mode of resistance and a way of memorialising a lost African culture and mythology for a diasporic people’ (Eye of the Huntress website). In 1987 he graduated with a BA in Film and Fine Art from St Martin’s School of Art, London. Influenced by his father's work, Ové began his artistic career with a series of exuberant photographs of the participants in Trinidad’s vibrant Carnival, a tradition started by French immigrants in the 18th century as an elaborate masquerade ball and later influenced by the transatlantic slave trade. After the emancipation of the British West Indies in 1833, freed African slaves took over the streets at carnival time, using song, dance and masquerade as symbols of freedom and defiance. He later made forays into sculpture, which he approaches as a form of narrative. Through his sculptural figures, ‘concocted from a dynamic assortment of materials, and resembling African and Trinidadian statuary, Ové plays with notions of identity, positing the self as complex, open, and interconnected’ (Eye of the Huntress website).
In 2015, Ové became the first Caribbean artist to be commissioned by the British Museum in London, with his pair of seven-metre high Moko Jumbie sculptures exhibited in the Great Court as part of the Celebrating Africa exhibition, prior to being permanently displayed in the Africa Gallery in March 2017. In 2016 his large-scale installation Black and Blue: The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness was exhibited in the courtyard of Somerset House in London as part of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair. In 2018 it was included in a series of new open-air displays celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. In building on his 2016 project for the 1:54 fair, Ové's installation references playwright, Ben Johnson’s The Masque of Blackness, produced by Anne of Denmark and members of her court at Somerset House in 1605. Featuring white actors in blackface, the play was reflective of the societal shift towards a preference for lighter skin in the early 17th century. Ové also alludes to Ralph Ellison’s acclaimed novel The Invisible Man, a pioneering consideration of racism and marginalised communities in America, told through the eyes of its black protagonist.
Ové says he seeks to ‘reignite and reinterpret lost culture using new-world materials, whilst paying tribute to both spiritual and artistic African identity’ (Zak Ové, Yorkshire Sculpture Park website). In this work, he uses graphite to explore what he describes as ‘future world black’ (Zak Ové, Yorkshire Sculpture Park website). The artist is constantly seeking ways to express recognisable, traditional African forms, while avoiding the predictable use of ebony, and exploring the sculptural possibilities of more contemporary materials, such as plastic. The form of the figure on which Black and Blue: The Invisible Men and the Masque of Blackness is based is a small, dark wood sculpture given to him as a child by his father in the 1970s. The way in which the original sculpture has travelled across land and time, has been adapted and re-shaped, thereby acquiring new layers of meaning, is a metaphor for the complexities of contemporary identity. Although the gesture is taken from a traditional, existing form, its raised hands resonate with and reference current tensions and the Black Lives Matter protest movement.
In 2019 Ové showed one of his biggest sculptures, Autonomous Morris in the Sculpture Park at Frieze London. Later that year he curated an exhibition at Somerset House entitled Get Up, Stand Up Now, which featured over 100 artists. It was, in many ways, an ode to the Windrush generation, and a critique of the Windrush scandal that occurred under Theresa May's Conservative administration. ‘I’m just so proud to be giving the recognition to my father and his creative peers, all members of the Windrush generation, that they thoroughly deserve, and show how they have indelibly impacted the cultural fabric of our country’, Ové explained (An Interview with Zak Ové, Love Magazine, 30 June 2019). Elaborating further, he stated that, ‘I identified and invited artists who have, similarly, made a significant contribution to shaping this country’s creatives and the cultural landscape in general. Pioneering work that challenges the systems of power and representation and continues to change the consciousness of society today, through perpetual agitation’ (Zak Ové, Love Magazine, 2019). Ové's masks also featured heavily throughout. Zak Ové lives and works between London and Trinidad and is represented by Vigo Gallery, London. His work is represented in UK public collections, including the British Museum and the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool. In late 2021 his work will feature in Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now, Tate Britain.
Related books
- Michket Krifa and Laura Serani, Encounters of Bamako 9: The African Photography Biennial (Paris, 2009)
Public collections
Related organisations
- St Martin's School of Art (student)
Related web links
- Artist page, Vigo Gallery
- Zak Ové: Black and Blue: The Invisible Men and the Masque of Blackness, Yorkshire Sculpture Park
- Zak Ové, The Culture Trip
- An Interview with Zak Ové, Love Magazine, 2019
- Zak Ové, CV, Eye of the Huntress
- Rebecca Anne Proctor, Mythic Carnival: British-Caribbean Artist Zak Ové’s Multimedia Artworks Requite A Lost African Culture, Harper's Bazaar Arabia
- BBC Arts, Blue-sky thinking: How Yorkshire Sculpture Park broke the mould11 July 2017
Selected exhibitions
- Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now, Tate Britain (2021)
- Get Up, Stand Up Now: Generations of Black Creative Pioneers, Somerset House (2019)
- Autonomous Morris, Frieze Sculpture (2019)
- Black and Blue: The Invisible Men and the Masque of Darkness, New Art Centre/Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2018)
- Talisman in an Age of Difference, Stephen Friedman Gallery (2018)
- Summer Exhibition, The Royal Academy of The Arts (2017)
- Moko Jumbies, The British Museum (2017, 2015)
- David Roberts Art Foundation (2015)
- Arms Around the Child, No 1 Mayfair (2014)
- House of Barnabas (2014)
- Speaker, Vigo Gallery (2013)
- Glasstress White Light/White Heat, Venice Biennale (2013)
- Ululation, Vigo Gallery (2012)
- New Re-Visions, House of The Nobleman (2012)
- The Return of The House of The Nobleman, The House of the Nobleman (2011)
- The Minotaur, Lazarides Gallery (2011)
- Past Future, Fine Art Society (2010)
- We Are Not Witches, The Saatchi Gallery (2010)
- Hell’s Half Acre, Lazarides Gallery (2010)
- Encomium, Fine Art Society (2009)
- Black & White Nudes, Carte Blanche Gallery (2008)
