Toyin Ojih Odutola,
Toyin Ojih Odutola, "Your Face is a Love Letter (Adeseun)," 2021–22; © Toyin Ojih Odutola; courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s New Work exhibition is set in the year 2050 in Eko, the Yoruba name for today’s Lagos. Inspired by the speculative fiction of Octavia E. Butler and the poetry of Dionne Brand, this new body of work contemplates how bodies, psyches, and architectures might respond to an overpopulated, mutated world.

Toyin Ojih Odutola, Local News, 2021; © Toyin Ojih Odutola; courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Toyin Ojih Odutola, “Local News,” 2021; © Toyin Ojih Odutola; courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Conceived during the pandemic lockdown and following Ojih Odutola’s “A Countervailing Theory” exhibition at the Barbican Centre, London (2020); Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Denmark (2021); and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2021–2022), “New Work: Toyin Ojih Odutola” melds storytelling forms to consider African and other global futures.

Born in 1985 in Ile-Ife, Nigeria and based in New York, Ojih Odutola is known for her drawings of figures, interior architectures, and landscapes that call on references ranging from art history to the artist’s own upbringing. Often produced in narrative series, her drawings describe scenes or chapters of overarching universes. The artist’s distinctively layered method of mark-making highlights topographies of skin and surface.

View of "New Work: Toyin Ojih Odutola" San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
View of “New Work: Toyin Ojih Odutola”

Exhibition Details:
New Work: Toyin Ojih Odutola
September 3, 2022–January 22, 2023
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
sfmoma.org


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