kó is pleased to participate at Untitled Art Fair in Miami Beach, Florida, featuring Kwadwo A. Asiedu, Bisila Noha, Joseph Obanubi, Mobolaji Ogunrosoye, and Ozioma Onuzulike.
Through painting, sculpture, collage, and digital experimentation, these artists explore the tactile materiality of their respective mediums, physically and conceptually layering materials to examine notions of history, identity, and place.
Kwadwo A. Asiedu (b. 1987, Ghana) is a painter who depicts highly impressionistic landscapes with a visual language of rich, textured layers, and pulsating light, texture, and colour. Asiedu examines the poetic and mysterious qualities of the natural world, channeling the idyllic world untouched by humanity’s corrosive tendencies. This focus, however, is anything but utopic. Asiedu highlights the spiritual and material interdependence between humans and their environment, creating an arresting homage to natural beauty and an urgent plea to preserve what’s left of it.
Asiedu was born in Mexico and currently based in Lagos, Nigeria. He holds a Masters degree in Environmental Management from the University of Hertfordshire, England. Recent solo exhibitions include As the World Wilts at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London (2023) and Raised Frequency at The International House IITA, Ibadan (2022). kó presented Asiedu’s work at Art Dubai and Art X Lagos 2023. Asiedu was featured as a selected artist for Art Across Borders, a special project of Art X Lagos 2023.
Bisila Noha (b. 1988, Spain) is a ceramic artist whose work explores overlooked craft traditions, particularly those led by women in the Global South. Her work is influenced by her Spanish and Equatorial Guinean heritage, examining multiple identities and challenging Western views on art and craft. Noha’s ceramics incorporate clay, plaster, and bronze, using processes of throwing, coiling, and craving. Noha’s work positions herself as a feminist activist, calling attention to forgotten women who have shaped the history of pottery. Noha’s work is in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Museum of Scotland. Her work has been featured in the
Financial Times and the New York Times. Her work was featured in the group exhibition, Body Vessel Clay at Two Temple Place in London, alongside the work of historical African ceramic artists Ladi Kwadli and Magdalene Odundo. Her first solo exhibition, Uprooting, re-rooting: Matter and Construction of the self, was held at Galerie Revel in Bordeaux, France, in 2022. kó featured Bisila Noha at Art X Lagos in November 2023. Noha lives and works in London.
Bisila Noha Water Jug 2023 Various clays 14.1 in height 10.6 in diameter
Joseph Obanubi (b. 1994, Lagos, Nigeria) adopts an interplay between digital and tactile experimentation, as he continually seeks to harmonize visual and spatial design. His work explores the relationship between identity, fantasy, technology, and globalization. His collages reconstruct fragments from everyday experiences, situating the subject within a new context. The series Generator is an excerpt from a larger body of work titled Mobile persons, where Obanubi delves into the tangible expressions of time, identity, and migration within a multi-dimensional framework.
The core concepts explored in Mobile persons are embodied in layers of collected negative films that harbor inverted memories and experiences. These layers are collaged with digital composites featuring “generated” Oriki—an expressive Yoruba oratory tradition that poetically exalts individual subjects— and subsequently layered through projections. Generator is a compilation of the orikis he conceived during this creative process.
Joseph Obanubi Existential support (excerpts from a praise song) I From the Generator series 2023 Archival print on Dibond, framed | Edition of 5, 42 x 30 in
Mobolaji Ogunrosoye (b. 1991, Lagos, Nigeria) uses the distortion of photography and collage to explore ideas around perception. Her practice revolves around ideation and exploring the different ways in which images of the female body may be distorted. In the Portraits series, Ogunrosoye creates multi-layer collages, incorporating a process of burning and cutting to create depth in revealing underlaying layers of images. The series addresses selfhood, body image, and the impact of societal influences on personal identity as it is related to Nigerian women.
Mobolaji Ogunrosoye Sabrie, One Within the Other 2023 Collage with archival paper, burnt archival paper, and coffee granules on archival paper 22 x 22 in
Ozioma Onuzulike (b. 1972, Achi, Nigeria) creates large-scale ceramic installations that hang like tapestries, formed from thousands of ceramic palm kernel beads, terracotta and copper rings, andnatural palm kernel shells. He explores the aesthetic, symbolic and metaphorical nature of the clay- working processes – pounding, crushing, hammering, wedging, grinding, cutting, pinching, punching, perforating, burning, and firing. His recent work is inspired by yam tubers, palm kernel shells and honeycombs which he mass-produces in terracotta and weaves together in often laborious processes. He configures a multiplicity of the individual units in ways that call attention to pressing socio-political and environmental issues, such as reckless politics, bad governance, imperialism, terrorism and climate change. Adopting the laborious process of firing the materials through multiple kilns, each firing creates unique colors and textures in transforming the clay, oxides, glazes and recycled glass.
Ozioma Onuzulike Royal Mat for the Oba's Palace 2023 Earthenware and stoneware clays, ash glazes, recycled glasses and copper wire (1,104 ceramic palm kernel shell beads) (24 kg) 45 x 45 x 6 in
