Group Show @ Skoto Gallery, NYC. Artists including Uche Okeke, Lula Mae Blocton, Juliana Zevallos, Trokon Nagbe, Afi Nayo...

Group Show

Skoto Gallery, New York

May 29 – July 26, 2025

Afi Nayo, Ahmed Nosseir, Bernard Guillot, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Cathy Lebowitz, David Rich, Diako, Fathi Hassan, Katherine Taylor, Khalid Kodi, Lula Mae Blocton, Michael Marshall, Olu Amoda, Piniang, Rosemary Karuga SoHyun Bae, Sophie Leys, Trokon Nagbe, Uche Okeke, Wosene Kosrof, Juliana Zevallos 

Skoto Gallery presents Group Show, an exhibition that brings together works by a diverse group of established and emerging artists working in a variety of media including painting, drawing, photography and sculpture.

With a mix of abstraction and sensitive realism that combines technical accomplishment with strong aesthetic appeal, the artists in this exhibition work across different time-periods and styles. Each of the artists re-imagines history, inheritance and vast possibilities in their work through the lens of individual and collective experiences, offering fresh perspectives that reflect the complexities and realities of contemporary identity. Each artist utilizes a particular rigor and economy which encourages a clarity of intent and simplicity of execution.

Afi Nayo’s (b. 1969, Lome, Togo) work is intensely personal and displays a blend of fragility, modesty and refinement. She uses pyro gravure and mixed media technique on wood panel to create pictures that consist of fantastic dream images, wit and imagination as well as overtones of fantasy and satire. They are dense with sensual surfaces, formal rigors and color harmonies that demonstrate a playful openness to art historical influences, while simultaneously encouraging multiple layers of meanings. She uses a complex language of symbols and signs drawn from the unconscious to obtain a poetic amalgam of abstraction and reality. She presently divides her time between Paris, France and Lome, Togo.

Trokon Nagbe draws on themes of memory, migration, history and the passage of time through the filter of personal experience. Firmly rooted in a framework of references that reflect his African heritage, he strives to push the bounds of his aesthetic while exploring intricate, and often paradoxical, relationship between the material and the spiritual, collective and the individual identity as well as the interior and the exterior. The visual resonance in his work is undeniable, attesting to his ability to seamlessly fuse ancient and modern concepts and aesthetic on new and innovative modes of representation while still contesting the meanings of the post-modern encounter between tradition and modernity.

Juliana Zevallos uses a wide range of media including her background as a versatile printmaker to create complex and poetic works layered with meaning and surface texture where some overlapping forms are fully present while other forms are partially obscured. They are simple, serene and as mature as thought. Closely viewed, her work is an invitation for contemplation that strives to reconcile intelligence and sensibility, knowledge and intuition as well as matter and spirit.

Lula Mae Blocton is an African American artist and painter. Color is her passion. What she has been dealing with is the quality of color, looking at it and perceiving it as transparent. Throughout her career she has tried to identify herself through the use of color relationships and structure. Her work can be seen as specific stages of developing towards these goals. Lula’s early work consisted of overlapping geometric patterns creating transparent combinations of color, much like weaving cloth to create a pattern.

Uche Okeke (1933-2016) Renowned for his immense contribution to the development of modern Nigerian art and pioneering visual experimentations with traditional Igbo Uli mural and body design, Uche Okeke’s early drawings in graphite, charcoal or ink are pure meditations upon the nature of line itself. A master of lyrical and sensitive lines, he uses resplendent curves and fluid lines to convey the true harmonies of his artistic vision. His work is in several permanent collections including the National Gallery, Lagos, Nigeria, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Newark Museum, Newark, NJ; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; The High Museum, Atlanta, GA, Iwalewa Haus, Bayreuth, Germany. He was included in the exhibition Stranieri Ovunque-Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Venice Italy.

SKOTO GALLERY

529 W 20th Street, New York, NY, 100011

skotogallery.com

Osi Audu @ Skoto Gallery, NYC - " Magic Box" Exhibition

Osi Audu: Magic Box

Skoto Gallery, New York

March 20 - May 3, 2025

Skoto Gallery presents Magic Box, an exhibition of recent drawings and paintings by the Nigeria-born artist Osi Audu. This is his sixth solo exhibition at the gallery.

Osi Audu’s recent work builds on his long-standing exploration of the dynamic relationship between line, form and color while remaining firmly rooted in the Yoruba philosophical concept of the human head as the locus of dreams, imagination and phenomenal experiences. Like the Magic Box, the human head holds a very powerful fascination for the artist, which has to do with its significance as a site of one’s identity and seat of the brain which coordinates the activities of the body including perception and communication. He uses his poetic sensibility effectively to explore his highly conceptual imagery of the head as a container of consciousness, combining minimalist geometric and organic forms with achromatic and contrasting colors to further underscore the interplay of the conscious, subconscious and superconscious in experiential responses, thereby obliging the viewer to look beyond the surface for deeper meanings.

Osi Audu’s work demonstrates unassuming techniques and depth of resonance. He combines complex compositional organization with spatial dynamics that eschew flatness, with a strong conviction in the spiritual energy of color to create works that continue to refine and re-define the language of abstraction. There is a physical as well as an emotional presence in his work that brings together a hierarchy of forms drawn from a range of sources including nature, classical African art, geometry and science combined with a willingness to reduce forms and ideas to their essence while simultaneously preserving an overall fluency, energy and beauty inherent throughout the body of work in this exhibition. There is a clarity of form in his work that is highly characteristic and easily recognizable.

Osi Audu’s work has been shown in numerous international exhibitions including Kwangju Biennale; Venice Biennale; The Africa-America exhibition at the Tobu Museum, Japan and the Museum of the Mind at the British Museum. He was educated in Nigeria and the United States. His work is in several public and private collections including the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, The Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ. The British Museum, Horniman Museum and Wellcome Trust, all in London; The Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire and the Mott-Warsh Collection, Flint. Michigan, among others. Corporate collections include SONY Classical, New York; Fidelity Investment Corporation, Boston, MA

SKOTO GALLERY

529 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.skotogallery.com

Frank Bowling, Skoto Gallery, NYC - Works from the Studio - Curated by Spencer Richards

Frank Bowling 

Works from the Studio

Skoto Gallery, New York

Curated by Spencer Richards

September 25 - November 1, 2003

Skoto Gallery presents Works from the Studio – an exhibition of paintings by Frank Bowling curated by Spencer Richards. This is the third occasion that Frank Bowling’s work are on display at the Skoto gallery. 

One of the most important artist of his generation, Frank Bowling has spent over forty years in total dedication to the practice and career in art. The axiom of his consumate skill as a master has been over these years gloriously articulated, with a non-flagging intensity and energy on the surfaces of his pictures. Through them, he has extended the paradigms of abstraction, which by 1971 had become the mainstay of his vision.

His pictures are creations that seem to evolve from the collision of chance – chance which is conjured up then assembled through placement of color, drops of paint, rhythm of brushstroke or splash of beer to further explore expressions inherent but still hidden in abstract painting. Their construction is verified in many places – in his head, on the floor or on the wall – before they are stitched canvas to canvas, yielding surfaces which offer themselves to viewers scrutiny masked behind constantly surprising subtlety and occasionally capturing those fleeting moments of magic in picture making.

The pictures in this exhibition illustrate Frank Bowling’s longstanding preoccupation with recolonization of space, of weaving new commentaries around the narratives of the tradition in painting. There is a great deal of critical experience, of knowledge and admiration of other artists’ researches in his dynamic abstractions as well as an ever sensitive deftly balanced interaction between modernism’s formal concerns with a belief in the emotive potential of painting. In the arena of modernism, Bowling as an “outsider” clearly has not only mastered its tenets but extended them, and like the powerful phalanx of Black artists (some of whom have been on the scene since the dawn of the genre) has brought into the arena a different declaration and a new way of making art.

At the Royal College of Art in the 1960s Frank Bowling was one of the brightest of a young generation of painters which included David Hockney, Boshier and Peter Phillips who were soon to initiate the next phase in the evolution of British art. Bowling’s famous painting “The Staircase” synthesized into one huge canvas all the stylistic concerns of the period and in doing so created a new pictorial strategy, namely, making a unified pictorial field with compositional elements belonging to different formal styles.

Frank Bowling’s work works are in several public and private collections around the world including the National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, West Indies; Tate Gallery, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; De Menil Foundation, Houston, Texas; Lloyd’s of London and The New Jersey Museum of Art, Trenton, New Jersey. Some of his “map” paintings from the late 1960s and early 1970s were included in FAULTLINES: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes at the recent 50th Venice Biennale.

SKOTO GALLERY

529 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.skotogallery.com