Through intricate multimedia drawings, the artist explores the limits of language, grief, and ancestral memory.
Courtesy of Jack Shainman.
At Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, Toyin Ojih Odutola’s latest exhibition ‘Ilé Oriaku’ transforms drawing into a deeply spiritual act. Taking its title from a blend of Yoruba and Igbo—‘Ilé’ meaning ‘house’ or ‘home’, and ‘Oriaku’, her late grandmother’s name—the exhibition builds upon the artist’s recent showings at the 2024 Venice Biennale and Kunsthalle Basel. Here, the artist envisions an imaginary Mbari house as the central stage for a new body of multimedia works that explore grief, lineage, and the power—and failure—of language.
Rooted in Igbo tradition, the Mbari house is a sacred space where deities are honoured and community resilience is celebrated through sculptural, architectural, and painted forms. Ojih Odutola reimagines this structure not literally but atmospherically, creating fragmented, prismatic interiors populated by solitary figures suspended in moments of exchange or contemplation. These characters, often with obscured faces or backs turned, operate like ‘spiritual performers,’ as the artist describes them—caught in states of transition, on the cusp of speaking or withdrawing.
Despite their ambiguity, the figures possess an acute psychological presence. Rendered in luminous, jewel-like tones, they occupy fractured environments where walls bend and dissolve, and gestures act as forms of speech. Language—verbal, physical, symbolic—is central to the show’s conceptual thread. The works ask: What happens when words falter? When cultural memory must be carried through images, rituals, or the architecture of the body?
The materiality of the works amplifies this sensitivity. Using charcoal, chalk, coloured pencil, graphite, and pastel on paper, linen, and translucent Dura-Lar film, Ojih Odutola creates richly textured surfaces that shimmer with emotion. The colours—drawn from Mbari traditions—carry both historical symbolism and personal resonance. Yellow, for instance, represents vitality and is linked to sacred clay from Nigeria’s Imo River, while green evokes renewal. Yet Ojih Odutola is equally interested in the emotive force of colour itself: its ability to hold feeling, space, and time.
Titles throughout the exhibition borrow theatrical language—acts, intervals, settings—suggesting the works form a sequence or constellation. But the narrative here resists resolution. Instead, Ojih Odutola offers glimpses, disruptions, and poetic contradictions. These are not traditional portraits; they are portraits as portals, charged with ancestral memory, cultural hybridity, and the ongoing process of making meaning.
This dual attention to the personal and the mythic extends to ‘Ilé Oriaku’, the newly released monograph accompanying the exhibition. Co-published with Kunsthalle Basel and designed by Pacific Books, the volume documents Ojih Odutola’s dual exhibitions in Venice and Basel, evoking the Mbari house as both concept and structure. Contributions by Mohamed Almusibli, Olamiju Fajemisin, and Erin Jenoa Gilbert are interwoven with creative texts by Nelene Ojih Odutola, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and others, forming a chorus of voices in dialogue with the work.
Ojih Odutola’s practice has long explored the fluidity of identity, the weight of storytelling, and the role of drawing as both a literary and visual tool. Her signature technique—layered, precise, and painstakingly detailed—emerged from her early use of ballpoint pen, a writing instrument she repurposed for mark-making. Over time, her work has expanded beyond portraiture to incorporate landscapes, domestic interiors, and imagined architectures—each rendered with the same meditative intensity.
Born in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, and raised in Alabama, Ojih Odutola often situates her work within the tension of cultural in-betweenness. ‘Ilé Oriaku’ honours that liminal space. It offers a sanctuary where grief is not resolved but transformed; where language may fail but image, colour, and gesture speak in its place.
The exhibition opened on May 6 and will be on view until July 18, 2025. For more information, please visit Jack Shainman.
