Kemi Onabulé
: False Spring

Night Gallery is pleased to announce False Spring, an exhibition of new paintings by Kemi Onabulé. This is the artist’s debut solo exhibition in the United States and follows her participation in the group show Shrubs, 2022.

Throughout her practice, Onabulé is known for her humanoid figures who interact with her vivid, post-apocalyptic landscapes. While broadening her world-making environments, Onabulé takes direct reference from her lived experience in painting bodies in shades of brown as she undermines Western landscape tropes. Where predecessors flattened and exoticized the “Other,” and created endless sightlines to suggest unbounded colonial domination, Onabulé creates contained scenes that reflect the deep, psychic spaces of her figures. 

Onabulé’s title derives from a line in Ernest Hemingway’s 1964 memoir A Moveable Feast: “When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest.” This “false spring,” and the winter weather that follows, mirrors the ups and downs of the writer’s life in interwar Paris. Onabulé’s “false spring” similarly references a summer that’s come too early, perhaps due to the climate crisis; our increasingly unstable seasons have warped our sense of promised time. The artist views such ecological vicissitude through the prism of the body: She considers how it responds to shifting landscapes—and may respond to the lush, regenerative climates that arise after the world we know disappears. 

Onabulé’s figures wade or gaze into eddying waters as volumes of green streaks and drips suggest the dynamic lands, grasses, and tropical settings around them. Lost Love and The Wish to Be Forgiven (both 2024) feature pairs of figures who reveal or conceal themselves in bright or twilit clearings. In the title painting, False Spring (2024), no figure appears. Instead, bare tree limbs arc across a desolate landscape that evokes the wreckage of California forest fires. In the distance, pastel waters reflect a luminous moon. Throughout these paintings, the artist considers what it means to have a witness, whether human or celestial.

Disparate art histories and mythologies inform these scenes. Onabulé refutes Paul Gaugin’s paternalistic visions of Tahiti while embracing the surreal simplicities of Noah Davis. Her dual heritage also shapes the complex relationship between her figures and their surroundings. 

Nigerian tradition centers and anthropomorphizes nature; forests have eyes and the land has a consciousness of its own. Greek tradition, on the other hand, focuses on humans while blurring the boundaries of form: Gods turn themselves into animals, while Narcissus, so seduced by his own aquatic reflection that he falls into a pool, ultimately sprouts into a flower.

Translation and transformation are similarly key to Onabulé’s process. The artist begins each work with drawing. She uses pencil, watercolor, oil stick, and oil paint on paper to solidify her image and determine the ideal texture of her brushstrokes. She then uses oil paint to recreate these energies and heterogeneous marks on canvas. The artist scratches back into wet oil to give further texture to her surfaces.

Through such contrivance, invention, and engagement with the fraught past, Onabulé discovers new forms and ways of working that are both generative and true. Trees fall and darkness descends around her figures. A green, new world springs up around them. No matter the setting, they remain sturdy and strong.