Toyin Ojih Odutola: Ilé Oriaku
Jack Shainman Gallery
46 Lafayette Street, NYC
May 6 – July 18, 2025
Images courtesy of Toyin Ojih Odutola and Jack Shainman Gallery
Toyin Ojih Odutola (born in Nigeria and based in New York) is an artist who creates multimedia drawings that reinterpret traditional portraiture. She is known for her distinctive skin treatments in her drawings, creating a signature style with intricate lines and mark-making using charcoal, pencils, and pastels. In her solo exhibition, “Ilé Oriaku,” at Jack Shainman Gallery, Toyin expands upon her techniques while incorporating grief, language, and her cultural heritage. The title, Ilé Oriaku, means ‘house of abundance’ and is a triumphant continuation of her inclusion in the Nigerian pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Toyin’s work, deeply rooted in Nigerian history and spirituality, takes on a more personal tone in this exhibition. Made within the past two years, much of the work in the exhibition focuses on grief, as they were created after her grandmother’s passing in 2023. While most of the figures appear grand and stylish and do not directly depict sadness, her grandmother’s influence and inspiration are ever-present. Instead of a direct recollection of grief and sorrow, this exhibition creates space for all the complex emotions and memories that confound into this beautiful visual language and reality.
Upon entering the exhibition, you are greeted with poetic, colorful figures that have a commanding yet soft presence. The layout of this exhibition serves as an extension of the work rather than just a backdrop. The artist employs uneven hanging of the artworks by placing some works higher on the walls than others and utilizes wall panels of various heights. This layout is designed to create a floating effect, making the pieces appear otherworldly and surreal in the gallery space. The viewer can flow through the space almost in a wavelength pattern, allowing the space between each artwork to act as part of the flow and breath of the work, similar to the way spaces and pauses are used in language. Jack Shainman Gallery’s new space in Tribeca also adds to this feeling of grandiosity in Toyin’s exhibition with the high ceilings and old columns paired with her sometimes larger-than-life statue-esque portraits.
Toyin is an artist who is not boxed in by genres or mediums. In earlier years, she primarily used dark black and brown ink to create wavy, layered lines that formed skin patterns, representing the various intricate details of the skin and body. In this exhibition, she explores how the technique applied to the skin can extend beyond the figure and become one with the composition, blending abstraction and figuration. In the piece Third Person Singular (kẹta eniyan / dị ndụ atọ), the pattern in the skin is bleeding all over the canvas, encompassing the background and the figure’s clothes. There is a less distinct separation between the styles in the foreground and background, making it appear like the figure exists in this surreal, dreamlike world without any bounds. This ‘surreal, dreamlike world’ is a space where the figure seems to be in a state of transition or transformation, challenging the viewer’s perception of reality. Like the mark marking of the skin, throughout the composition, the marks are not placed automatically or in any particular pattern. They follow the same crevices and flow of vessels, and the way the skin appears to move and form.
Adding to the surreal nature of the exhibition are the pieces’ dreamlike compositions, which are portrayed as not being tethered to physical reality. For instance, in Nwanyeruwa (Aba Women’s Rebellion), two figures exist on different planes. One figure stands upright, appearing to look off into the background. In contrast, another larger figure seems to be flying through space, challenging the viewer’s understanding of reality and inspiring us to think beyond the standard representation of portraiture.
In some works, such as “Veil” and “Congregation,” she sticks to her monochromatic color palette. However, in works like Lẹhin Mgbede (before and after the Evening’s Performance), the color palette takes on a new meaning when she employs saturated bright colors like orange and pink, which heavily contrast with the dark hues in the skin tones. For Toyin, color is a tool used to ground the figures in the composition, while the mark-making in the drawings themselves became softer.
