In a painting by Neni Omuku The circlea wounded figure lies on a frame, a body dripping from what appears to be rubble surrounded by a group of figures with unchanged faces. A small hand is raised as if blessing the injured figure as it is carried to safety. In the photo, the crowd slowly fades as they move away from the scene.
The work was inspired by the collapse of a building near the artist’s studio in Onikan area of Lagos Island. “That’s a portrait of humanity, and where we should be as individuals,” the artist told the Observer. “It was just people coming together, pulling people out of the rubble. There was no one from the government to help. So this piece of mine is about compassion and sharing grief.”
This June, at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, in a solo exhibition with the same title, the Nigerian painter and sculptor will be showing works made between 2020 and 2026. It is his first institutional exhibition in the US, and the exhibition will explore the protests and political uncertainty associated with collective solidarity and beauty through paintings that reflect on new collaborations around the world.
Omuku is not new to collective exploration and participation. After graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art, overwhelmed by feelings of isolation and emptiness, she returned to Nigeria and found a foundation in textiles. “When I turn around, if I see a person wearing a traditional costume, I can just say, this person is from here, who does he belong to,” he said. “That was so fundamental to me that I could look at someone and see a little part of who they are through their clothing.”
That social excitement fueled her textile investigation across Nigeria, where she settled on Sanyan, a pre-colonial hand-spun fabric made from cotton combined with wild silk fibers. Sanyan is worn by the Yoruba people in the south-west of Nigeria, and their fabrics took the paint and the brush well, and soon turned this cultural fabric into a fabric.
In this exhibition, Omuku evokes history again with archived images of Nigerian protests as a reference for his paintings, in the process of creating a re-weaving, re-imagining and re-imagining of history. “I knew I was painting a precious material with an important history,” he says of the collision of fabric and archives. “I think about the length of weaving in Nigeria that is done in this very beautiful time. I also look at the cases where the base of the society was divided because of protest.”
His paintings will be presented alongside the museum’s collection of African art in a conversation that reveals the continuity of culture and material through generations. For a long time, African collections have been relegated to anthropological events and ethnographic studies, but Omuku believes that the upcoming exhibition will expand that context, provide a space that elaborates on the histories and traditions of making art over time, and open a new discourse about the art of the continent.
Beauty forms a piece of the earthquake puzzle in “The Gathering.” This comes largely from Omuku’s background in agriculture, training with his mother, a florist and local artist. Arranging flowers became part of her thinking about composition, color and discipline, although it remained a silent part of her process and making. “All gardening is landscape painting. The idea of changing nature to suit a particular beauty is what we do as landscape artists. The same principles.”
It was the impending depression brought on by the repetitive difficulty paintings that made him ask new questions of his practice, inviting the beauty of flowers and nature to the fore. “I thought, shouldn’t art have a space to dream of other worlds? With new things? With a new future? In that aspect of dreaming, the state of the world finally came in. I opened myself to Nigerian romanticism, a gift to the bodies in my paintings. Nothing speaks of freedom like nature.”
The result of that freedom is a work rooted in material history and a memory that is tactile but sensitive to its emotions. The artist does not look at beauty in times of crisis as a serious thing but as a necessary intervention, something he showed well in the painting with jerrycans during the fuel shortage protest. Bodies are thrown into the beauty of the landscape; chaos and difficulty are acknowledged, but there is also recognition of dreaming young thinkers.
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