1987–present
Nengi Omuku
Nengi Omuku, born in Nigeria in 1987, studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and has shown her work in Lagos, London, New York and Berlin. In 2003 she won a British Council competition, and in 2018 she painted a mural in a psychiatric ward at the Maudsley Hospital. Her paintings are in several collections, among them the HSBC Art Collection.
Biography
Her first award came when she was sixteen. In 2003 Omuku won a British Council art competition held in connection with the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), and the prize was presented to her by Queen Elizabeth II.
She was born in 1987 in Nigeria, in Delta State. By some accounts it was Asaba, by others Warri; there is no agreement, so I name only the state.
She received her higher education in London, at the Slade School of Fine Art, part of University College London, where she completed both her BA and her MA in fine art. In 2011 she was awarded the Nancy Balfour MA Scholarship, and in 2012 the Prankerd Jones Memorial Prize. She exhibited while still a student: in 2009 she showed at the Camden Art Gallery in London, in 2010 at the Swiss Cottage Gallery, and then in Bristol, in the exhibition “The Future of Contemporary Art”. In 2011 her first solo exhibition, “To Figure an Encounter”, took place at Open The Gate in London, and in the same year she took part in group shows at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery and at the Slade Research Centre. In 2012 her work was included in the Jerwood Drawing Prize exhibition at the Jerwood Gallery in London. Among her early large canvases are “I can’t feel my legs” (2012, oil on canvas, 220 × 160 cm) and “Botticelli” (2012, oil on canvas, 100 × 140 cm). A later work, “Corkscrew”, dates from 2014.
From the mid-2010s her work has been shown in Nigeria and abroad. “A State of Mind” was shown in 2015 at the Omenka Gallery in Lagos, and a year later at the Armory Show art fair in New York. In 2014 she took part in the group exhibition “The Next 50 Years” at the same Omenka Gallery. Then came ART15 in London (2015), “Stages of Collapse” at the September Gray gallery in Atlanta (2017), the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London in 2017 and 2019, and shows in Lagos: at ARTX (2017) and at Arthouse (2018). In 2018 her work was included in the exhibition “Hospital Rooms” at the Griffin Gallery in London.
That same year Arts Council England commissioned her to paint a mural in an intensive care psychiatric ward at the Maudsley Hospital in London.
In 2020 the artist began working with the Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery: it staged her solo exhibition “Gathering” in London, followed by a showing at the Untitled Art fair in San Francisco and the group exhibition “All the Days and Nights”. The paintings “Room with a view” (130 × 190 cm) and “What was lost” (208 × 243 cm) belong to this period. Both are oil on sanyan, the name for a hand-woven Nigerian cloth, and I have found no documented explanation of why she chose this support instead of canvas. In 2021 there was a solo exhibition at the Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery in Berlin and a group show at the Contemporary Art Centre in Noisy-le-Sec, France. Her work is in the HSBC Art Collection, the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection and the Dawn Art Collection.
Profile notes