Nengi Omuku

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 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.