She looks every bit your typical corporate girl with sophistication, taste, and class. Yet Veroniccah Muwonge’s job is anything but corporate. She plies the ‘dirty’ trade called art and work for her means getting paint in her hair, smudges on her apron and hands as she handles other not-so-clean materials in her studio, USTADI, in the Ntinda-Kisaasi suburb of Kampala city.
She has held exhibitions of her paintings in Kenya, Rwanda, Zambia, Nigeria, South Africa, France, Germany and the USA but it is her recent solo exhibition at Nommo Gallery that is the talk of the town. Themed “Destiny”, the show once again thrilled lovers of art with her unusual technique.
Whether working on small or large canvass, she revealed a peculiar style of application of colours and the actual texture on the surface that made her favorite hot colours, the kind associated with artists not afraid to experiment, appear to fly off the canvass.
Her canvasses were laden with female figures, both dressed and nude, rendered in abstract. Some of the figures are posed in rather teasing poses, as though threatening to let out something sinister but managing to keep whatever it is hidden.
The combination of teasing subjects, hot colours, texture, and technique appears to create a sense of adventure or even danger and high temperatures around her work.
The distinguishing factor between Muwonge and her contemporaries, she says, is her compelling spontaneity. Her themes arise from the natural impulse or inclination, rather than from planning or in response to suggestions from others. She is inspired by her own body and then the immediate surroundings. The Nommo Gallery show zeroed on her life; with paintings designed to tell the story of where she is from, where she is at now, and where she is headed professionally.
Born 28-years ago in Kampala, Muwonge completed her degree at the Makerere University School of Fine Art in 2002. But in the short six years as a professional artist, she has created a niche for herself as a woman artist who is not afraid to experiment.
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