PinchukArtCentre

Toyin Ojih Odutola

Toyin Ojih Odutola (b. 1985, Ife, Nigeria) creates drawings utilizing diverse mediums and surfaces to investigate the potential in the striated terrain of an image, to further question its formulaic representations. Ojih Odutola has participated in exhibitions at various institutions, including Brooklyn Museum, New York (2016); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2015); Studio Museum Harlem, New York (2015, 2012); Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield (2013); and Menil Collection, Houston, (2012). Current solo exhibitions include Scenes of Exchange, 12th Manifesta Biennial, Palermo, Italy, through November 4, 2018; Toyin Ojih Odutola: The Firmament, Hood Museum of Art (Hood Downtown), New Hampshire, 2018; Toyin Ojih Odutola: Testing the Name, Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia, 2018; Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2017-2018; and A Matter of Fact: Toyin Ojih Odutola, Museum of African Diaspora, California, 2016-2017. Permanent collections include Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, Spencer Museum of Art, and the National Museum of African Art (Smithsonian). She earned her BA from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and her MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Ojih Odutola lives and works in New York. Toyin Ojih Odutola in her artistic practice focuses on the sociopolitical construct of skin colour and depicts an alternative reality, where colonial past never happened and where depicted characters can live without any colonial and cultural guilt. What is to be rich without that? What would be their attitude if the racial oppression had never happened? For her exhibition within the Future Generation Art Prize 2019, she presents a series of paintings that depict scene from an unpublished book, written by the artist. Her works reference an aristocratic European tradition of commissioned portraits that she uses to manifest black figure identity. The artist offers an alternative point of seeing black history declining the dramatic component of postcolonial discourse. It is not a story about struggle and oppression, rather a story about wealthy and aristocratic folk.
Toyin Ojih Odutola (b. 1985, Ife, Nigeria) creates drawings utilizing diverse mediums and surfaces to investigate the potential in the striated terrain of an image, to further question its formulaic representations. Ojih Odutola has participated in exhibitions at various institutions, including Brooklyn Museum, New York (2016); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2015); Studio Museum Harlem, New York (2015, 2012); Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield (2013); and Menil Collection, Houston, (2012). Current solo exhibitions include Scenes of Exchange, 12th Manifesta Biennial, Palermo, Italy, through November 4, 2018; Toyin Ojih Odutola: The Firmament, Hood Museum of Art (Hood Downtown), New Hampshire, 2018; Toyin Ojih Odutola: Testing the Name, Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia, 2018; Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2017-2018; and A Matter of Fact: Toyin Ojih Odutola, Museum of African Diaspora, California, 2016-2017. Permanent collections include Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, Spencer Museum of Art, and the National Museum of African Art (Smithsonian). She earned her BA from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and her MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Ojih Odutola lives and works in New York. Toyin Ojih Odutola in her artistic practice focuses on the sociopolitical construct of skin colour and depicts an alternative reality, where colonial past never happened and where depicted characters can live without any colonial and cultural guilt. What is to be rich without that? What would be their attitude if the racial oppression had never happened? For her exhibition within the Future Generation Art Prize 2019, she presents a series of paintings that depict scene from an unpublished book, written by the artist. Her works reference an aristocratic European tradition of commissioned portraits that she uses to manifest black figure identity. The artist offers an alternative point of seeing black history declining the dramatic component of postcolonial discourse. It is not a story about struggle and oppression, rather a story about wealthy and aristocratic folk.