
Greene Naftali is pleased to present Brandon Ndife’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Ndife’s material transformations cultivate an intimate dissonance between the natural and the manufactured, nesting organic shapes (branches, roots, and gourds) within sculptural shells that resemble domestic furniture—ingeniously hand-built to evoke the mass-produced items that order our private lives. His work confounds the lifecycle of consumer objects with its uncanny mix of ripening and rot, and functions for the artist as a conduit to broader systems of uneven distribution. The exhibition design embeds the work in a sprawling environment that recalls a city street, where discarded items left curbside are vulnerable to weathering and prying eyes, yet also made available to fresh encounter—to change hands and find new use.
Brandon Ndife composes sculptures by assembling forms of furniture, domestic objects, and elements of the natural world. Through hand-building, painting, and casting in synthetic resin or polyurethane foam, Ndife creates meticulous replicas that keep the readymade tradition at a subtle remove. Expectant with ripening and rot, the works appear like relics unearthed from a distant past or envoys of a dystopian future. Ndife is drawn to domestic items, in part, for their capacity to index American life under capitalism—wrought with racial, class, and now ecological disparities in all that we touch. In his composites, wild growth seems poised to overtake the built environment, with all its structural exclusions. For him, the works “operate as portals that get us thinking about objects that are larger than our systems, larger than ourselves.”


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