BIOGRAPHY

Born in Warri, Nigeria, 1987

Omuku is a visual artist and founder of The Art of Healing charity (TAOH) who lives and works between Lagos, Nigeria and London, United Kingdom. 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, Nengi 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, created from woven threads of wild moth silk and blended with industrial cotton. For the artist, the blend of oil paint and Sanyan speaks to living between cultures, yet firmly contextualising her work within her local setting of Nigeria.

Recent exhibitions include Soulscapes, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London; Aso Oke: Prestige Cloth from Nigeria, Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; A Corps Defendant: La Galerie Centre d’Art Contemporain, Paris; and a solo institutional exhibition, The Dance of People and the Natural World, Hastings Contemporary, England. Omuku was awarded the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in Italy (April 2024), The Black Rock Senegal Residency (2023), and The World Trade Organisation Residency in Geneva (2021). 

Omuku’s work can be found in international private and public collections, such as the Baltimore Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami); The Whitworth Collection, Manchester, HSBC Art Collection; The Bunker Artspace Museum; Loewe Art Collection; Monsoon Art Collection; Easton Capital Collection; Azman Museum; Dawn Art Collection; Ditau Collection; Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge; Norton Museum of Art.