Nengi Omuku
'There We Sat Down'
Nengi Omuku’s paintings bridge diverse histories and modes of art making. Situating her work in both West African pre-colonial traditions of textile production and European oil painting technique, Omuku honors her heritage while evoking shared human experience. The artist creates her paintings on an unconventional yet culturally important material called sanyan, a hand-woven textile of blended cotton and silk made by the Yoruba people that signifies prestige and is typically worn on special occasions, which she carefully prepares as the substrate of her ethereal scenes. Omuku’s images depict dreamlike figures with obscured identifying features in lush natural landscapes. Though ambiguous, the figures are based on photographs of friends and colleagues. Probing the interior psychological states of her sitters, Omuku creates bodies that hover between specificity and universality, transcending the earthly limitations of the human form. Her singular painting approach is a meditation on ancestral knowledge, while expressing the personal as a mode of reflecting the collective.
Nengi Omuku’s paintings bridge diverse histories and modes of art making. Situating her work in both West African pre-colonial traditions of textile production and European oil painting technique, Omuku honors her heritage while evoking shared human experience. The artist creates her paintings on an unconventional yet culturally important material called sanyan, a hand-woven textile of blended cotton and silk made by the Yoruba people that signifies prestige and is typically worn on special occasions, which she carefully prepares as the substrate of her ethereal scenes. Omuku’s images depict dreamlike figures with obscured identifying features in lush natural landscapes. Though ambiguous, the figures are based on photographs of friends and colleagues. Probing the interior psychological states of her sitters, Omuku creates bodies that hover between specificity and universality, transcending the earthly limitations of the human form. Her singular painting approach is a meditation on ancestral knowledge, while expressing the personal as a mode of reflecting the collective.
About the artist
Using the subject of the body to translate interior experience, Nengi Omuku’s (b. 1987, Warri, Nigeria; lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria and London) expressive paintings portray abstracted figures among spectacular, celestial landscapes that draw evocatively from the natural world, horticulture, and creationism. 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 and her personal experiences, touching on themes of gender and domesticity, national and ceremonial dress, and the endurance of indigenous culture in the face of colonial rule.
Omuku was selected to join the inaugural Artist Council of the Museum of West African Art, Benin City, in 2025. She has earned numerous scholarships and awards, including the British Council CHOGM Art Award presented by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Commissions include a 2018 mural in an intensive care psychiatric ward at the Maudsley Hospital, London, from the Arts Council England. In 2021, she received a World Trade Organization Residency organized by African Art Foundation in Geneva. Omuku has presented solo exhibitions at Kasmin, New York; Hastings Contemporary, U.K.; and Arnolfini, Bristol, U.K., among other venues. She has participated in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco; Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Austria; Dak’Art, African Contemporary Art Biennale, Dakar, Senegal; Dulwich Picture Gallery, London; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, U.K.; Saint Louis Art Museum; and the Bangkok Art Biennale. In 2023, she was awarded the Civitella Ranieri Residency in Italy following a 2022–23 residency at Black Rock Senegal. Omuku’s work is held in international public and private collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Newark Museum of Art, N.J.; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the HSBC Art Collection; and the Loewe Art Collection, among others.
Credits
There We Sat Down is organized by SCAD Museum of Art curator Ben Tollefson.
