Skoto Gallery is pleased to present Blue Tales, an exhibition of recent works by the Sudanese-born artist Khalid Kodi. This will be his second solo show at the gallery. The reception is Thursday, April 1, 6-8pm and the artist will be present.

Khalid Kodi’s recent work continues his exploration of strategies that fuse personal history and experience with his desire to portray social, spiritual and utopian transformations. He creates works that are infused with strong references to magical realism and deep concern for the aesthetic struggle between form and concept. He uses contemporary themes drawn from the rich story-telling traditions of his homeland to construct intricately layered and textured pictures that demonstrate a mastery of design, color, composition and draftsmanship. The often repetitive, sensitive and exploratory brushstrokes in his work are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. His landscapes are not representations of nature in the traditional sense of the term, rather they are abstract expressions of new artistic and spiritual possibilities, using planes of color and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields that are at once both a direct expression of the sensations of the observing eye and an abstraction from observed nature.

Khalid Kodi, is a prolific artist who has emerged as a central figure of his generation working on multi/cross-cultural concepts that focus on the milestones of human life. His past series have included works that poignantly address human phenomena such as wars, genocide and their impact on human societies. These works incorporate sculpture, paintings, installations and environmental sites, and possess unique qualities of ripeness and continuous growth. They convey a sense of mystery that reveals the complex context of his formal and conceptual innovations, and allude to a balanced art, not in the sense that it is stabilized or moderate in its effects, but that opposed qualities are joined in a scrupulously controlled play. He is inventive and original in many different aspects of his art, evocative of the power of art to speak to us purely on human terms.

Born in the Sudan, Khalid Kodi grew up in the city of Wad Madina, where his family was prominent in the arts. He obtained his undergraduate degree in painting from the College of Fine Arts, The Institute of Polytechnic Colleges, Khartoum in 1987 before leaving for the US in the early 90s. He obtained his MFA from the Massachusetts College of Arts, Boston in 1993. As an African artist living in America, he has embraced both cultures, and his work is a conversation of elements from both. He is an Adjunct Professor of Fine Arts at Boston College, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and a resident artist in the African American Master Artists in Residence Program (AAMARP), Department of African American Studies, Northeastern University. Khalid Kodi is a widely exhibited artist whose works are in several private and public collections in Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Asia and the Americas.