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Biography
“Even when working with oils on sanyan, I’m aware that I’m bringing together western and West African heritage. I really enjoy being in the middle. It helps me have a broader view of the world.” —Nengi Omuku, as told to Frieze
Using the subject of the body to translate interior experience, Nengi Omuku's expressive paintings portray abstracted figures among spectacular, celestial landscapes that draw evocatively from the natural world, horticulture, and creationism. Born in Warri, Nigeria, Omuku spent many years in London while studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, where oil painting remained central to the established canon. Her distinctive, multifaceted process culminates in the application of oil paint in richly-textured brushstrokes to gesso-prepared composite strips of the Nigerian fabric sanyan. A tightly-woven, hand-spun material, sanyan is one of several forms of textile that have shaped Nigeria's cultural history.
Omuku's impressionistic landscapes and distinctive, rich color palettes provide enveloping spaces for the artist's loosely rendered individual and group portraits. Blending interior and exterior, figure and ground, Omuku explores themes of refuge and stillness interwoven with personal narratives drawn from her recent experiences in Lagos, London, New York, and in residence at Civitella Ranieri, Italy. With works suspended from the ceiling, the installation activates the gallery architecture while offering viewers a space of reprieve from the motions of daily life.
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Omuku's unique practice, which involves active research into and custodianship of the production of sanyan, interlaces traditions that honor both the artist's West African heritage as well as her personal history. A recurring subject in her work is the social group-families and communities whose ambiguous presence suggests a contradiction. While we desire to gather and belong, we may also experience a sense of dislocation from our identity or society. The artist's interest in bringing forth such unspoken social and psychological realities speaks both to the stories of her subjects-who she has often photographed and painted in her studio-and to her reflections on rising civil unrest in Lagos, where political tensions have developed intergenerationally since the British colonization of Nigeria in 1884. Increasingly, Omuku's use of the figure is drawn from sources in archival and contemporary media, further positioning the body as a site of triangulation for societal issues.
Omuku's landscapes, however, are those of the mind. Romantic and impressionistic, with distinctive palettes that demonstrate her profound sensitivity to color, they meld mesmerizing perspectival shifts with instinctive brushwork that appears to raise the image from the painting's surface. The act of becoming-of bringing into being-reappears as a subject in the work through references to creationism, baptism, and ritual, while the paintings themselves are testaments to the imaginative power of belief, reverie, and empathy. Omuku's spiritual and philosophical contemplations are the wellspring from which these images emerge.
Omuku increasingly perceives her practice as a conversation with her medium. Through her heavily-researched use of sanyan, she explores its historical significance, touching on themes of gender and domesticity, national and ceremonial dress, and the endurance of indigenous culture in the face of colonial rule. Increasingly, her paintings' subjects are depicted in patterned garments, with drapery used as a framing device. A recent body of work features cotton-spinners in Senegal in the process of producing the textiles.
For all their splendor, the artist's rich visions are tinged with pathos. Omuku's desire for an experience of her pre-colonial homeland is entwined with their material, just as the producers of sanyan would traditionally include prayers in the form of symbolic markings in the fabric's weave. Informed by a commitment to honor this past, Omuku's sensational visions constitute an embodiment of our eternal present.
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Nengi Omuku, Garden City, 2025
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Installation Shots
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Works
Nengi Omuku b. 1987
Rabble Rousers, 2024oil on sanyan64 1/8 x 47 5/8 inches, overall
163 x 121 cm
55 1/8 x 39 3/4 inches, painting
140 x 101 cmNews-
Now Open: Nengi Omuku: There We Sat Down at SCAD Museum of Art
August 24, 2026 Read more -
Nengi Omuku Selected for British Art Show 10 by Hayward Gallery Touring
Landmark exhibition curated by Ekow Eshun launches in Coventry, UK, in October 2026 April 15, 2026 Read more -
Nengi Omuku: The Gathering at the de Young Museum
Opening June 27 in San Francisco March 23, 2026 Read more


