Ronewa Art Projects is pleased to begin its 2025 exhibition program with the group exhibition Traces. Opening with a public reception on January 30 at 18:00, Traces brings together an array of mediums and techniques by artists Ali Ecker (Germany/USA), Hyacinthe Ouattara (Burkina Faso/France), and Michael Dell (New Zealand). All three artists have an artistic practice driven by process, each having developed a characteristic method of layering their materials to explore and probe what is visible, what is unseen, and what is contained in the remnants.
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Traces:
group exhibition
Featuring: Ali Eckert, Hyacinthe Ouattara, and Michael Dell
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Installation Views
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Ali Eckert
German American artist Ali Eckert grew up within two cultures, which underscores his art practice. His work is strongly influenced by American imagery and pop cultural elements, and he explores various iconography to reflect its ongoing cultural transition. Eckert’s unique analog process combines photography, digital artistry, and painting. He stages and photographs his subjects –such as iconic everyday objects or roadside scenes –and creates hyper-realistic composite images. He then manually transfers his images to canvas, wood, or aluminum, accentuated with textured painting techniques. The effect is a nostalgic vision of the American Dream that appears cracked and eroded.Eckert works between his studios in Berlin and Wisconsin. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Wiesbaden, Germany, and after a career in film directing, he turned to visual art in 2007. Eckert has exhibited in numerous presentations in the USA and Germany, aswell as in Switzerland, Hungary, and China. He has received several international awards, and his works are notably held by the Sander Collection (Basel), the Zagoras Collection (Athens), the Neumann-Hug Collection (St. Urban), and the German Art Fund Hungary, among others. -
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Hyacinthe Ouattara
Hyacinthe Ouattara is a multidisciplinary artist from Burkina Faso, living and working in Paris, France. Material, texture, and color are of great importance in his work. His way of painting is predominantly spontaneous and gestural, while his installations play with suspension and the tension between balance and instability.After training in drawing, he began to represent the human body in a dreamlike, ghostly, and childlike way before focusing on the anatomy of cellular tissues through “human maps.” Ouattara expanded his practice through a self-taught exploration of sculpture, installation, and performance.Ouattara’s sculptures, inspired by organic forms, consist of twisted, knotted, and patchworked found textiles. Through them, he reflects on concepts of memory, identity, connection, and intimacy while questioning the ambivalence between appearance and disappearance.Born in 1981 in Burkina Faso, Hyacinthe Ouattara received training in live model drawing, graffiti, and painting before embarking on a personal approach within the artist collective “Les Autres Yeux” and contributing to the creation and development of the Hangar 11 workshop in Ouagadougou. His work has been exhibited in Paris, Berlin, Dakar, Ouagadougou, Accra, Luxembourg, and Kalgoorlie, Australia. -
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Michael Dell
Michael Dell’s paintings and drawings shift between abstraction and representation. His works have been described as having an ambivalent everyday quality, equally unremarkable in lack of narrative and simplicity, as they are absorbing in stillness and otherness.The single-image photograph has long been a source material for Dell and his paintings and drawings often mimic the analogue failures of film negatives and discarded film prints. His paintings, both abstract and landscapes, bear evident attention to the picture surface, creating a static tension between materiality, depth and subject.Dell was born in Christchurch, New Zealand. He has exhibited solo shows widely within New Zealand and was selected for the touring group exhibition ‘Print and Paper’ that traveled to Kurashiki, Japan. In 2020, the Nelson public art museum The Suter Art Gallery held a solo exhibition of Dell’s recent paintings and drawings. His works are held in public art collections throughout New Zealand, including The Christchurch City Art Gallery, Waikato Museum of Art and History, The Suter Art Gallery, and in the Auckland University Art Collection. Dell is the recipient of several national art awards, most recently winning the 2019 Parkin Drawing Prize. -