Helena Foster: Time Honoured

Opening Reception, Thursday, April 3, 6–8pm

Kasmin announces the first New York solo exhibition of London-based painter Helena Foster (b. 1988, Benin City, Nigeria), which will open at 297 Tenth Avenue on April 3, 2025 and run through May 3, 2025. Helena Foster: Time Honoured features new oil paintings on linen, paper, and vellum that express Foster’s lyrical approach to painting as an accumulation of cultural and generational wisdom. Foster draws freely from literature, theater, film, Igbo oral tradition, and religion, achieving a dreamlike aura of mystery in dynamic compositions ambiguously set between thick vegetation and the built environment. Often populated by figures, whether isolated in anticipation of a gathering or in groups who huddle, recline, and walk in procession, these scenes cohere into a visual universe distinguished by its earthen palette and deft rendering of light. Exploring themes of community, memory, and prophecy, Foster’s paintings offer visual proverbs for the contemporary age.

Foster instinctively pulls from early Nollywood film stills, gospel passages, and Igbo proverbs to develop allegorical compositions that reverberate with emotional resonance and a sense of familiarity. A pair of large-scale paintings on linen, Burden Bearers (2024-25) and Get Up and Dig (2024-25), anchor the exhibition and underscore the narrative vitality of Foster’s work. These canvases feature groups of figures in a terrain of reddish earth, towered by trees and a colorful open sky: in the former, a parakeet overlooks a group of men huddled together; in the latter, a sparrow watches as four standing women encourage a seated fifth to join them on her feet. The men’s shrouded behavior suggests the transformative power of community to offer protection through nourishment and wisdom in difficult times. Their pursuit is answered by the women who uplift their protagonist, now prepared to come out of refuge and begin a new journey on her own.

The settings of Foster’s paintings create a bridge across time and place. Bright One, Full of Light (2024-25) sees an open sunflower field dissolve into abstract swathes of color, based on the landscape the artist observed on a train from Paris to Arles, France. Nearby, Go Slow (2024-25) sees a single file line of workers arrive in the warmth of daylight, shedding the darkness of the coal mine behind them. Inspired by a 1956 photograph of workers exiting the Iva Valley coal mine in Enugu, Nigeria, the site of a 1949 massacre of striking workers, Foster’s painting provides a prescient reminder to be gentle—but also to persist.

Foster’s works on paper and vellum, a highly refined form of parchment, emphasize the literary connotations of her compositions. She conceives of painting as an act of translation, reimagining the structural elements of Igbo proverbs in figurative, literal, and abstract dimensions. Her attentive technique analogues the tonal nature of the Igbo language: Foster carefully applies each brushstroke with a pronounced delicacy, anticipating the responsive temperament of her substrates. At an intimate scale, Sunday Ritual (2024) and Get Set, Go (2024) present lone figures whose surroundings diffuse into passages of color, an effect extended to larger works such as In Procession (2024), where a woman in green leads a line of men toward the entrance of a building.

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