Wura-Natasha Ogunji's upcoming exhibition, space comma space comma space embraces not-knowing, the breaking of habits, irreverence and the use of mistakes as integral components of the creative process. Through works on paper, the artist creates a memoir of her time inside the studio - through acts of stitching, cutting, tearing and tracing. The drawings, paintings, and collages are in conversation through shared marks and methods, as well as through titles which suggest a more literal dialogue between the works themselves.
With this new body, Ogunji uses magazine pages, gessoed tissue paper, and glassine, as well as the architectural tracing paper for which she is known. Many of the works have an almost-hyperbolic density to them--especially when considered alongside her past oeuvre where stitched figures are commonly surrounded by large expanses of paper-space. There is an irreverence for the correct way materials should be used: oil paint on tracing paper, a two-sided painting (where only one side is visible, but both are important), or the combination of oil and ink forming a resist pattern of dots along the surface of the trace.
In other works, like Lagoon in Tatters, cut paper becomes fringe, leaving two large openings, the paper falling beyond the edges of its own borders. In a similar drawing, those same lagoon lines become an oasis. Or, perhaps the large hole in the paper is the space of refuge. This dance between the fullness, or presence of (artistic) matter, and absence is a recurring language throughout the show, lending an almost-trickster like quality to the work, especially when considered in concert with the titles. The four painting-drawings on gessoed tracing paper present a poetic riddle with their titles:
What I want
something something
same same
a thing in a thing in a thing, the mountain was mentioned, are you my mother?
The mother figure appears often in the form of the Gelede mask, part of the Yoruba ritual festival for celebrating women and mothers. For the artist, the paper itself becomes a ritual space. The lines, gestures, marks, motion, cuts and cutaways of thread, graphite, ink, paint, paper and earth are the elemental languages of ______________, _______________, ________________. Here space takes on multiple meanings. It is, of course, form, emptiness, but, and another space entirely. The stillness of the comma; the thing around the thing you're trying to get at; a lull but not a lapse. The paper, too, has polyrhythm.
About the Artist
Wura-Natasha Ogunji is a visual artist and performer. Her works include drawings, paintings, videos and public performances. She is deeply inspired by the daily interactions and frequencies that occur in the city of Lagos, Nigeria, where she currently lives. Ogunji's performances explore the presence of women in public space; these often include investigations of labor, leisure, freedom and frivolity.
Recent exhibitions include A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography at Tate Modern, 2023-24; rīvus, 23rd Biennale of Sydney, 2022; Diaspora at Home, Kadist Foundation, Paris, 2021; and The Power of My Hands: Afrique(s) artistes femmes, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 2021. Ogunji was an Artist-Curator for the 33rd São Paulo Bienal where her large-scale performance Days of Being Free premiered. She has also exhibited at: Palais de Tokyo; The Lagos Biennial; Kochi-Muziris Biennale; Stellenbosch Triennale; Seattle Art Museum; Brooklyn Art Museum; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. Ogunji is a recipient of the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and has received grants from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation; The Dallas Museum of Art; and the Idea Fund.
Ogunji's works are in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; The Baltimore Museum of Art; Smithsonian National Museum of African Art; International African American Museum, Charleston; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; North Dakota Museum of Art; The University of Texas at Austin; Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College; and Kadist Foundation.
She has a BA from Stanford University (1992, Anthropology) and an MFA from San Jose State University (1998, Photography). She resides in Lagos where she is founder of the experimental art space The Treehouse.
