Exhibition

Betty Ogun: LOVE/FIGHT

Tache, London, United Kingdom
18 Sep 2025 - 23 Oct 2025

Betty Ogun, Untitled (2022), Copyright the artist, Courtesy of Tache Gallery

Betty Ogun, Untitled (2022), Copyright the artist, Courtesy of Tache Gallery

Tache presents LOVE/FIGHT, the debut solo exhibition of new and recent works by London-based multidisciplinary artist Betty Ogun. Running from 18 September – 23 October 2025, the show features large-scale paintings, photography, textile, sculpture and video, exploring Black womanhood through the intersecting perspectives of militant femininity, new wave feminisms, and feminine resilience, portraying scenes that reflect both strength and struggle.

Ogun’s works are defined by their expressive and vibrant colour palettes, evocative textures, and themes with strong cultural resonance. Her artistic practice sits at the intersection of documentary and abstraction, guided by a quest to understand how cultural, collective and personal histories shape contemporary lived experience.

Exhibition highlights include a diptych of paintings entitled Enjoy and Cheerleader that reimagines the cheerleader with intellectual depth and cultural critique. In these dynamic paintings, Ogun moves beyond the surface of synchronised performance to examine themes of identity, collective expression, the feminine experience and pressures to perform. Bold colour palettes and gestural brushwork fragment familiar imagery – pom-poms, squad uniforms, choreographed poses – into layered compositions where celebration and tension exist at once. Stereotypes are distorted and abstracted into darker motifs, as Ogun challenges the viewer to reconsider the cheerleader: these symbols of youthful exuberance exist within complex narratives of gender, labour and representation. This series realises the intentions of Ogun’s artistic practice as a whole: to blend figurative storytelling with incisive social commentary, and to examine the subtle interplays between visibility and vulnerability in contemporary culture.

Additional highlights include Ogun’s Fight series, a bold collection of paintings that meditate on survival, endurance and self-expression through conflict. Thinking and Mother and Baby Unit, both depictions of women the artist has met or seen, are celebrations of motherhood and symbolic of the experience as life changing and uniquely difficult. Repeated checkerboard motifs found within her textile works are embodiments of a belief that life, much like a game of chess, requires tactics and calculated decision making.

 

tachegallery.com

 


All content © 2025 Contemporary And. All Rights Reserved. Website by SHIFT