Purdy Hicks Gallery is pleased to present Marcia Kure's first London exhibition. The work - made during her recent Residency at the Victoria and Albert Museum - comprises drawing, photomontage and sculpture imagining alternative worlds as a critical response to the postcolonial existential condition.

Marcia Kure (born 1970, Nigeria) lives and works in Princeton, USA. Trained at the University of Nigeria, she is an alumna of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Haystack Mountain School. In addition to 14 one-person exhibitions in Nigeria, Germany, the Netherlands, and the USA, her work was shown at La Triennial, Paris (2013), International Biennial of Contemporary Art (Seville) and Sharjah International Biennale (2005). A Research Fellow of the Smithsonian Institution (2008), Visual Artist in Residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum (2014) and winner of Uche Okeke Prize for Drawing (1994), Kure's work is in the collections of the British Museum, the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Newark Museum, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, IWALEWA-Haus, and the Sindika Dokolo Foundation. She will present her work at the 11th Dak'art, Biennale of Dakar in May 2014.

Marcia Kure is a prominent member of the University of Nigeria-based Nsukka School known for its combination of lyrical simplicity and socio-political vision. Through appropriation and reconfiguration of normative fashion aesthetic, classic juvenile literature, African masking forms, and children's toys, she produces hybrid, darkly striking images and objects that insinuate postmodern loss of certainties and postcolonial destablisation and fragmentation of identities. Her work suggests that from our complex encounters with the present might emerge new orders of being that are at once hopeful and despairing, reassuring yet haunting, beautiful and terrifying.