Nengi Omuku

Nengi Omuku

Nengi Omuku is a visual artist and founder of The Art of Healing charity (TAOH) who lives and works between Lagos, Nigeria and London, UK. She completed her BA and MA at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London.

Using the subject of the body to translate interior experience, Omuku’s expressive paintings portray abstracted figures among spectacular, celestial landscapes that draw evocatively from the natural world, horticulture, and creationism. Drawing inspiration from the social and psychological realities of her subjects, whom she has often photographed and painted in her studio, as well as from various sources in archival and contemporary media, she creates worlds in which the distinction between bodies and nature is often blurred, reflecting on the intricacies around navigating place and belonging. The images are rendered in oil paint and painted on strips of Sanyan; a pre-colonial western Nigerian fabric.

Omuku has shown her work across the world with solo shows in Lagos, London, Berlin & New York and institutional shows at Arnolfini Arts, Bristol, UK (2023-2024) Hastings Contemporary, UK (2023); New Hall Art Collection, Cambridge (2022); La Galerie Centre d’Art Contemporain, Paris (2021); Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art, Lagos, Nigeria (2021) and World Trade Organization, Geneva (2021).