DIana Ejaita: Exercises in Liberation

Best known internationally as an illustrator for The New Yorker, Ejaita has recently returned to analogue production. This exhibition spans painting, drawing, sculpture, and poster installation, created during the artist’s residency with kó in Lagos. Her paintings embody the idea of assembled histories, where past and present converge through forms, symbols, and negative space. Fluid silhouettes emerge from dense layers, with recurring motifs resembling bodies, natural elements, and ritual objects such as horns, shells, plants, crowns, and natural fibers.

Ejaita’s indigo drawings suggest the fluidity of timeless water, created daily at dawn and dusk as rituals of calm and meditative prayer. Her sculptures appear as communal bodies that act as vessels linking earth and sky, pointing to our shared spiritual experiences and the wellbeing of the community. The textiles evoke the challenges the body must pass through, walls that bear the traces of passage.Across these media, Ejaita works through a process of layering and assemblage. She creates what she refers to as “nature morte” or “visual prayers” that imagine new forms of experience and exchange. For Ejaita, art is an exercise of liberation, breaking away from repetitive gestures and rigid structures through meditative making that counters the accelerated pace of contemporary life.

Diana Ejaita (b. 1985, Cremona, Italy) is an artist and illustrator based between Berlin, Lagos, and Milan. Ejaita studied Fine Art at Rennes 2 Arts Plastiques (France) and HBK Braunschweig (Germany). Her illustrations have been featured on ten covers of The New 
Yorker, with two covers in 2025. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Economist, 
Vogue, Financial Times, and Monopol. She is the author and illustrator of eight children’s books published between 2021 and 2024, including Olu & Greta (2022), Our World: Nigeria with Bunmi Emenanjo (2025), and Making Art (2025). Her work has also been commissioned by global companies including Google, Apple, Comme des Garçons, H&M, and Coca-Cola Nigeria.

Ejaita’s recent solo exhibition, Onajite, l’Attesa, was held at at Galerie Wedding, Berlin (2024). Recent group exhibitions include The Unfinished Conversation, Kunstmuseum Ravensburg (2025); Biennale de Dakar, Archive Book (2024); 4+3=1, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin (2022); Long Distance Call, Kunstpalais Erlangen (2022); and Restitution de la résidence d’artiste au Village Opéra, Centre Kahiri, Ougadougou (2021). She has also participated in exhibitions including Afro Futures: Fashion – Hair – Design, Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin; Concrete Limbo, Haus der Statistik, Berlin; Miic – International Exhibition of Contemporary Illustration, Galicia, Spain; and the Zurich Design Biennale. Ejaita is the recipient of the Villa Romana Prize Fellowship (2023) and has participated in residencies at Waaw in Saint-Louis, Senegal, and the Arthouse Foundation in Lagos.