Njideka Akunyili Crosby: In Dwell – Aso Ebi

As part of its 50th anniversary celebration, the Hayward Gallery Billboard features “Dwell: Aso Ebi” (2017) by Los Angeles-based, Nigerian-born artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby. The billboard is installed on the side of London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, which faces the gallery.

Akunyili Crosby combines painting, drawing, fabric and found imagery to create dense and complex works on paper. In Dwell: Aso Ebi (2017) – reproduced here as a digital print on vinyl – the artist explores ‘transcultural’ identity and the experience of living between two places.

Deeply engaged with the history of painting, Akunyili Crosby is also concerned with making work that ‘speaks to now’, and to her own experience.

The result is a sophisticated form of sampling that sees the artist ‘nodding and winking’ to the traditions she’s steeped in, while simultaneously subverting or adapting them for her own purposes.

The Hayward Gallery Billboard, featuring Dwell: Aso Ebi (2017) by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, is part of the gallery’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby (born 1983, Enugu, Nigeria) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. In 2017, she was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship Genius Grant and was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize. Recent solo exhibitions include Obodo (Country/City/Town/Ancestral Village), MOCA Mural, Los Angeles, USA (2018) and Front Room: Njideka Akunyili Crosby|Counterparts, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, USA (2017).

Art on the Underground presented a new work by Akunyili Crosby at Brixton Underground station in September 2018.

www.southbankcentre.co.uk