Since February 2020, art historian and writer Alayo Akinkugbe has been championing emerging and forgotten Black artists, sitters, curators and thinkers as the founder of the Instagram account @ABlackHistoryOfArt. Today, she shines a light on the work of Nengi Omuku.
Akinkugbe says: “I met Nengi at her studio in Lagos in 2020, we had just been through months of lockdown and I remember being so moved to encounter her paintings as the first works of art after being at home for so long.
“We connected via Instagram, after we’d been featured on the same episode of Katy Hessel’s The Great Women Artists podcast, and realised we were both in Lagos.”
Inspired by archival and current images taken from the Nigerian press and media, Omuku creates ethereal scenes of figures in constant flux, interacting with one another and the landscape around them. She also works in oil paint on strips of Sanyan – a Western Nigerian fabric created from woven threads of wild moth silk and blended with industrial cotton.
Akinkugbe says: “I love Nengi’s work for its otherworldly aesthetic quality, but also for the fact that it is physically intertwined with Nigerian cultural history: Nengi paints on vintage Sanyan, a traditional Yoruba fabric, which is still worn today. With her work, she transcends the two-dimensional nature of painting, often hanging paintings away from the wall, turning them into installations and allowing the viewer to appreciate all angles of the work – both her painting and the fabric itself on the reverse of it.”
Omuku says: “My work is influenced by the experience of living in Lagos, Nigeria. With some of the pieces coming from contemporary and archival press photographs and others being purely imagined portals for escape.”
In addition to showing her work across the world in solo shows in Lagos, London, Berlin and New York, Nengi Omuku has also been commissioned by the Arts Council England to paint a mural in an intensive care psychiatric ward at the Maudsley Hospital, London. Providing people in challenging circumstances with access to contemporary art as a form of therapy is something Omuku feels strongly about and inspired her to create The Art of Healing, a charitable organisation in Nigeria. TAOH also works with leading contemporary artists to transform hospital rooms to help improve the living conditions of patients.
Until April 29, Omuku’s work can be currently seen at Gagosian, London as part of Rites of Passage, an exhibition of 19th contemporary artists who share a history of migration, curated by Péjú Oshin
