DADA Gallery is pleased to announce Bunmi Agusto’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, ‘Lands of the Living’.
DADA Gallery is pleased to announce Bunmi Agusto’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, ‘Lands of the Living’. The exhibition, curated by Agusto, features mixed-media works on paper continuing the artist’s world-building practice that follows life in her fantastical paracosm known as ‘Within’.
Using a combination of painting, drawing and printmaking, Agusto juxtaposes opaque drawn figures with translucent printed images in order to explore the relationship between the physical and unseen metaphysical forces. With art historical references to ancient mythologies, Surrealism, the Zaria Art School and the semiotics of comic books, her works come together to narrate a magical tale that depicts death as transition and afterlife as simply another form of life. She draws from overlapping elements across Christian, Islamic, Buddhist and Yoruba religious ideologies —such as the concept of axis mundi and the positions of the heavens and earth— to introduce a geometric logic to the nature of existence.
‘Lands of the Living’ marks Bunmi Agusto’s first solo exhibition since the completion of her MFA from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford where she was awarded the Mansfield-Ruddock Prize and her inclusion in Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2023. The New Contemporaries exhibition is currently open at Camden Art Centre until 14 April 2024.
Bunmi Agusto (b.1999 Lagos, Nigeria) lives and works in London. Her practice explores psychology, cultural theory and the evolution of selfhood through the lens of fantasy. Her works combine drawing, painting, and printmaking as they tell the stories of the inhabitants of a surrealist wonderland in her mind called Within. The indigenous inhabitants of this world are hybrids whose human form is combined with elements she finds integral to her sense of self and cultural consciousness. Non-Hybrid humans are also present in Within as family members, friends and passersby in the artist’s waking life are subsumed into the world through encounters and begin to occupy the role of cross-reality migrants in her mind.
Agusto holds an MFA from Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, an MA in History of Art & Archaeology from SOAS University, London and a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, for which she received distinctions in all three degrees. Agusto was awarded the Mansfield-Ruddock Prize in 2023, the Clarendon Scholarship in 2022 and the Cass Art Prize in 2019 and 2020. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally and was recently featured in the Free The Wind, The Spirit and The Sun exhibition curated by Yinka Shonibare CBE RA at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.