Wall Street Journal Article. A headline of the same name was published later in the
Frieze Magazine. In
The Guardian, he was called “Giant of the Art World” while
The New York Times coined Enwezor “the Curator Who Remapped the Artworld”, and the “Curator Who Shaped a Global View of Contemporary Art”. The list goes on.
Suffice it to say, Okwui Enwezor, a poet, art critic, art historian and curator, was a man of astonishing and global influence an art world giant, whose legacy has not, and probably will not, be forgotten for many years to come.
Born on 23 October 1963 in Calabar, a port city in the South of Nigeria, Enwezor was part of an affluent Igbo family. The reality of the Biafran war (1967-70) meant that much of his childhood was spent moving around to avoid conflict; the family eventually settled in the eastern Nigerian city of Enugu.
The work: Butcher Boys (1985/1986)
What is it exactly?
The sculpture is made up of three oil-painted plaster figures whose bodies mostly resemble the human male body, but whose heads are part animal. The three are seated next to each other on a bench, each seemingly staring out in a different direction. Their scarred bodies look human, but their mutated heads seem to be sprouting horns. Their eyes are black, and on two of the figures there are holes where their ears should be. The third head has horns sprouting out where the ears should be. On all three, their noses are deformed and they don’t seem to have mouths. It is as though their mouths have been smashed in or sliced off along with a part of their nose.