Wura-Natasha Ogunji: Cake

Fridman Gallery is honored to present Cake, Wura-Natasha Ogunji’s first solo exhibition in New York. Ogunji works in drawing, painting, performance, and video. The exhibition includes new drawings and a site-specific thread installation, accompanied by a selection of the artist’s early video works.

In many of her drawings Ogunji explores water as architecture – lagoons rendered in ink, stitched lines of a river, or the empty space of the paper itself (an imagined expanse of sea). The work also often develops around language. As the artist creates, titles emerge and become the structure determining the form of the pieces. ä

Stitching the gallery space floor-to-ceiling, the thread installation turns the space itself into a drawing that viewers can enter, a container for collective experience.

Ogunji’s early performance videos investigate concepts of migration, border crossing, homeland, and longing. The artist crawls across the hard earth with water bottles tied to her ankles, jumps over water, levitates above outer-space or seafloor landscapes, leaves marks in parched soil with hands and feet wrapped in stones and thread.

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