Issue 10, Profiles

Nengi Omuku

Ethereal Landscapes, Collective Dreams

Words SALOMÉ GÓMEZ-UPEGUI

Photography JOSHUA J. SNEADE

Conjured from her mind’s eye, Nengi Omuku’s ethereal landscapes blend abstracted bodies with lush botanicals and expansive vistas that hold calm and chaos. Immersive compositions crafted in oil on richly gesso-prepared sanyan — a beloved hand-spun Yoruba textile — the paintings unfold as layered palimpsests, carrying traces of Nigerian artisanal traditions on the brink of disappearance while reckoning with Omuku’s lived experience and the many contradictions of contemporary life in her native land. At once earthly and divine, her figures inhabit Edenic realms while remaining deeply attuned to our shared human condition.

Born in Warri, Nigeria, Omuku felt called to become an artist from an early age, a path that first led her to years of study at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She recalls her move to London as a profound culture shock, one that stirred existential questions around identity and belonging, ultimately shaping her approach to painting the body. “I began removing features, the things that typically define a person, and replacing them with abstract marks that undulate through the body,” she tells me. “I wanted to express the body as a site of living emotional turbulence beneath the skin. It’s how I felt at the time and what much of my early work explored.”

Today, the figures in Omuku’s works remain largely devoid of facial features, yet rather than solely grappling with questions of individual identity, they tend to speak about collective experiences. Rarely singular, these bodies reflect the artist’s acute sensitivity to shared states of being and communal realities, a concern that first emerged in her practice in 2013, when she returned to Nigeria from London and began contemplating the quotidian hardships of her homeland.

In New Haven (2025), for instance, a multitude of figures — drawn from archival photographs of people in Nigeria queuing for fuel — stand beneath a kaleidoscopic sky. Nigeria is marked by chronic fuel shortages, a reality made visible in the everyday sight of people lining up with yellow jerry cans at filling stations. “I wanted to lift these figures out of that lived condition and place them within a dense, richly colored landscape in which plants are larger than the bodies themselves and the figures are finally free to rest on their jerry cans and simply take in the abundance that surrounds them,” Omuku says.

For all the thematic complexities that run through Omuku’s oeuvre, a luminous quality remains deeply embedded in her landscapes, one that can best be traced back to her upbringing as the daughter of a florist and landscape gardener. Her mother often encouraged her to form an intimate relationship with plant life, prompting her, for instance, to speak to plants as she watered them. This connection has since flowed organically into her painting, and as a result, botanicals frequently dwarf and overshadow the figures within her compositions, as seen in New Haven.

“I used to think my relationship to plants was separate from my painting,” Omuku reflects, “but I’ve become increasingly aware of how the principles of landscape painting, horticulture, and floristry flow into one another. It has become almost symbiotic, my relationship with plants and with painting.”

As such, Omuku’s dreamscapes often begin as pastoral scenes. “In my mind, these are safe spaces where I want to place bodies, so they can experience them,” she says. “Still, you can’t have paradise without chaos. And sometimes that chaos breaks through into the work.”

Fire for Fire (2025) perfectly exemplifies this paradoxical approach. What initially appears as a richly colored idyllic scene of figures at ease within a lush landscape ultimately delivers a stark reality check, revealing, at the bottom right of the painting, a depiction of police clashing with civilians. Similarly, in Nzogbu Nzogbu (2024), Omuku invites viewers into a paradisiacal setting in which a figure rests peacefully amid vibrant florals and plant life, seemingly oblivious to the pressures of everyday existence. Set in quiet opposition to this moment of calm, however, is a group of figures engaged in a war chant. As Omuku explains, “Here, war keeps reappearing as a constant nightmare that invades the dreamscape. It’s a painting about the paradise I’m trying to build and reality creeping in.”

It is impossible to fully understand the depth of Omuku’s practice without considering her use of sanyan as a canvas, an approach also closely tied to her return to Nigeria from London in 2013. After years away, she found in textiles a portal back to a sense of self and place, and during the early years of her homecoming, she recalls obsessively asking friends and acquaintances to share their vintage traditional garments. Living in Lagos, this curiosity led her to become intimately familiar with aso oke, a treasured Yoruba textile traditionally woven on a narrow loom. One day, a friend invited her to see the earliest version of the fabric, opening a box filled with vintage sanyan, a luxurious form of aso oke made from a blend of silk and cotton. “I had an immediate aha moment when I saw this box,” Omuku recalls. “Its materiality felt remarkably similar to canvas linen, and the more I read about it and learned how closely it is tied to the land, the more my interest grew.”