The FLAG Art Foundation is pleased to present Ian Mwesiga: Beyond the Edge of the World, the Ugandan artist’s debut institutional solo exhibition in the United States. Comprised of eleven oil paintings created between 2021 and 2023, Mwesiga’s recent works embrace the mystery, fantasy, and possibility of the unknown.
Mwesiga’s canvases begin with the figure—fictional characters formed from the artist’s imagination—around which he constructs surreal environments, pairing seemingly familiar landscapes with quietly bizarre atmospheres. This contrast is achieved through Mwesiga’s manipulation of the proportion and setting of quotidian objects. In Tales of the Moonlight Boy, 2023, a bare-chested man reclines on a crinkly, pink satin sheet draped over an ornate balustrade, while a striking, orange bird perches atop a globe-sized passion fruit; in Lady in a Blue Dress at a Bus Stop, 2023, a woman in a brightly patterned dress waits in anticipation on a desolate sidewalk while a figure holding an umbrella dissolves into a grisaille fog.
Within the composition, Mwesiga’s figures appear as if they are situated at the intersection of a parallel dimension that, whether solitary or coupled, suggest isolation. His world consists of ephemeral reflections, refractions, and shadows; like symbols in a dream, imagery recurs throughout the exhibition. In these sequences, order is expressed through tiles and bricks and abstraction is realized through overgrowth and mist—the natural world brought into high contrast. Here, seemingly disparate elements like falling leaves, partially-eaten apples, and black-headed gonolek birds occupy a familiar universe where seasonal, temporal, and lunar cycles are suspended.
A striking spectrum of blue unites the works in Beyond the Edge of the World, gracing glistening pools, abandoned stairwells, and Pepsi billboards with brilliant hues. Mwesiga welcomes the color’s inherent dichotomies, capable of underscoring a sense of calm or melancholy. With blue, he melds the sky, land, and sea, creating a mirroring effect that connects unfathomably vast nature with the landscape in and around Kampala—interwoven with visions from his personal life, experiences, and travels.
The exhibition’s title is borrowed from Haruki Murakami’s 2002 novel Kafka on the Shore. As the author describes and the artist depicts, “Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And hovering about there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”
A commissioned text by Dr. Darla Migan, art critic, philosopher, and professor at The New School, New York, NY, accompanies Mwesiga’s exhibition.
This exhibition was organized by The FLAG Art Foundation with the generous support of the artist, Amoako Boafo, the Blanchard Nesbitt Family, Jane and Bob Clark, Jesse Williams, Laurence Brown, Tiana and Vikram S. Chellaram, and others.
February 23, 2024
