Working with a distinctive process, Nengi Omuku transforms sanyan cloth, a traditional prestige Aso Oke textile, into canvas used to depict her immersive landscapes dealing with cultural memory, identity, collective experience and ultimately refuge.
Omuku’s abstracted figures, often faceless and fluid, are set in landscapes that conflate the artist’s observations of everyday life and hardships together with dreamscapes, to depict possible, thriving worlds. In blending personal and cultural memory with botanical elements, Omuku’s work challenges static, modernist visions of the city and instead offers an adaptive, inclusive model of coexistence.
Drawing from Impressionist techniques, Omuku carefully builds the image through layers of brushwork and bold color, ultimately rendering a vision of a place that evokes the senses and welcomes viewers to enter into an uplifting, internal geography.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Using the subject of the body to translate interior experience, Nengi Omuku’s expressive oil paintings portray abstracted figures in spectacular, celestial landscapes that draw from the natural world, horticulture, and creationism. Omuku’s impressionistic landscapes and distinctive 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 and her West African heritage. Omuku paints in oil on sanyan, a traditional Yoruba Aso Oke fabric that the artist sources, and often commissions in order to keep the weaving tradition alive.