In Nengi Omoko’s painting Assemblya wounded figure lies on a stretcher, his body falling on what appears to be shards of rubble, surrounded by a group of figures with amorphous faces. A small hand is raised as if to bless the injured person as he or she is taken to a safe place. In the picture, the audience gradually fades away as it moves away from the scene.
The work was inspired by the collapse of a building near the artist’s studio in the Onikan neighborhood of Lagos Island. “This is an image of humanity, and where we should be as individuals,” the artist told the Observer. “There were only people who gathered, pulling people out of the rubble. There was no one from the government to help. So this piece for me is about empathy and sharing grief.”
This June, at the de Young Museum in San Francisco A solo exhibition with the same titleThe Nigerian painter and sculptor will exhibit her works between 2020 and 2026. Her first institutional show in the United States, the exhibition will explore protests and political uncertainty alongside collective solidarity and beauty through paintings that contemplate collective care and the dream of new worlds.
Omoko is not new to exploring collectivity and belonging. After graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art, she returned to Nigeria, buoyed by feelings of isolation and difference, and found grounding in textiles. “Wherever I turn, if I see someone wearing traditional dress, I can immediately tell, ‘This person is from here, this is who they belong to,’” she said. “It became so fundamental to me that I could look at someone and recognize a little part of them through their clothes.”
That euphoria of community inspired her research into textiles across Nigeria, where she settled on sanyan, a pre-colonial hand-spun textile made from cotton mixed with wild silk fibres. The Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria wear Sanyan clothing, and their textiles adapted well to paint and brushwork, quickly transforming this communal cultural fabric into cloth.
In this exhibition, Omoko evokes history once again through archival images of Nigerian protests as reference for her paintings, in the process of reweaving, reshaping and remembering history. “I was aware that I was painting on a heritage fabric that had real historical importance,” she said of the collision of canvas and archive. “I think about the rise of textiles in Nigeria that was achieved in this golden age of industry. I also look for instances where the fabric of society has been dismantled by protest.”
Her paintings will be displayed alongside the museum’s African art collection in a conversation that reveals cultural and material continuity across generations. For a long time, African collections have been relegated to anthropological events and ethnographic studies, but Omoko believes the upcoming exhibition will expand this context, providing a space that illustrates the history and traditions of art-making over time, as well as opening up a new discourse about art from the continent.
Beauty forms a seismic piece of the puzzle in “The Gathering.” This largely comes from Omoko’s horticultural background, as she trained with her mother, a florist and landscaper. Flower arrangements have been an integral part of how she thinks about composition, color and restraint, although they have remained a quiet part of her process and practice. “All gardening is landscape painting. The concept of changing nature to suit a particular scene is basically what we do as landscape painters. It’s the same principles.”
It was the looming depression brought on by the retrospective paintings of hardship that prompted her to ask new questions about her own practice, and to invite the beauty of flowers and nature to the fore. “I thought, shouldn’t art have a space to dream of other worlds? Of new things? Of new futures? In this element of the dream, the landscape finally emerged. I opened myself to Nigerian romanticism, a gift to the bodies in my paintings. Nothing speaks of liberation like nature.”
The result of this liberation is work integrated into material history and memory, which is tangible and sensual in its sensations. The artist views beauty in times of crisis not as tension, but as a necessary intervention, which she aptly displays in a painting showing jerrycans during a protest against gasoline scarcity. Bodies are thrust into the beauty of the landscape. There is an acknowledgment of chaos and hardship, but there is also an acknowledgment of dreaming up new fantasies.
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