NENGI OMUKU

Having trained as a horticulturist and florist, the natural world is a key source of inspiration for Omuku. Inspired by both European impressionist painting, her mother’s drawings of plants, and her own background in gardening and floristry, the artist depictions of nature are lush and sensual in deep, abstracted colour. Omuku’s paintings represent an ethereal place of natural co-existence where ecological beings are removed from their old hierarchies of subject and habitat. Omuku’s paintings are neither portraits nor landscapes, and often the distinction between the figures and their natural settings is blurred. Painting on stitched-together strips of sanyan fabric, Omuku grounds her otherworldly landscapes in a local tradition of time and place. In a union between Indigenous Yoruban artwork and her delicate oil paint brushwork, Omuku creates a palimpsest between past and present. Her figures become ambiguous allegories of Nigerian social memory, painted onto pieces of longstanding cultural heritage.

Nengi Omuku (b. 1987, Nigeria) lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria. She received her BA (2010) and MA (2012) from the Slade School of Art, University College London. In 2026, Omuku will have her first institutional solo exhibition in the US at de Young Museum, San Francisco. __Later this year she will be included in Roots in The Sky at HOME, Manchester, curated by Tunji Adeniyi-Jones. In 2023, the artist’s first institutional exhibition in the UK, The Dance of People and the Natural World, opened at Hastings Contemporary, before travelling to the Arnolfini, Bristol in 2024. In 2024 she was nominated by artist Yinka Shonibare for a solo presentation in the Artist-to-Artist section of Frieze London. In 2022, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, presented Parables of Joy, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Other recent exhibitions include An Uncommon Thread, Hauser & Wirth, Bruton, UK (2025); The Poetics of Dimensions, Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, CA (2024-5); The 15^th Dakar Biennale, Senegal (2024-5); Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, Austria (2024-5); the Whitworth, Manchester (2023-4); Kasmin, New York, NY (2024); Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (2023-24); Saint Louis Art Museum, MO (2023-24); Kristin Hjellegjerde, West Palm Beach, FL, (2023); __Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (2023); Gagosian, London (2023); and Bangkok Art Biennale (2022-2023). Collections include Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; The Government Art Collection, UK; The Norton Museum of Art, FL; The Whitworth, Manchester; Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL.

Text courtesy Pippy Houldsworth Gallery.