Sanyan and City Views: Nengi Omuku Paints Between Worlds
A figure turns away from us, gazing out over a city—yet their face is left unseen. This is the quiet power of Nengi Omuku’s paintings, where identity flickers in gestures and garments rather than names or features. Omuku, a Nigerian artist now showing with New York’s Kasmin gallery, paints on sanyan, a traditional Nigerian textile, weaving together the softness of home with the sharp edges of history.
Her scenes—domestic yet oddly impersonal—blur the line between public and private, challenging assumptions about how artists of color are expected to represent themselves. Drawing on her training in London’s Romantic painting traditions, Omuku references both British art history and the legacies of colonialism, but sidesteps direct storytelling. Instead, her work lingers in the spaces between: familiar yet estranged, rooted yet unmoored. In Omuku’s hands, the canvas becomes a meeting ground for memory, material, and the many ways we inhabit our own skins.
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