Artist Conversation with Mitra Abbaspour, Houghton Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Harvard Art Museums

Odili Donald Odita brings heightened awareness to color and space in paintings where abstraction is an optically, physically, and culturally-felt phenomenon. Though they are rooted in a broad range of historical lineages—Africanist approaches to pattern; modernist painting and design; and contemporary conceptual positions, to name a few—his compositions make immediate appeals to the senses in the here and now. Degrees of Separation, the artist’s first solo exhibition at our gallery, features a group of new paintings in which Odita poses pointed questions about the meaning and perception of darkness in a variety of social and aesthetic contexts. Executed with acrylic paints on either canvas or reconstituted wood panels, the paintings are distinguished by shifting, angular, and ray-like compositions in which apparent symmetries and grid-oriented images of order are offset by the visceral, structuring function of color. Odita is known for his commitment to mixing pigments by hand anew for each painting, so that the same color never appears in his work twice.