{icon-p}
Start
{icon-rundum}
Artworks
{icon-kalender}
Calendar
{icon-mehr}
More
DE
Language

Toyin Ojih Odutola

The Casting of Oil and Water II, 2015

Information

Location Gallery 2
Artist

Toyin Ojih Odutola

*1985, Ile-Ife, Nigeria

lives and works in New York, USA
Title

The Casting of Oil and Water II, 2015
Medium Pen ink, marker, and gel ink on paper
Copyright  © Toyin Ojih Odutola, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
Exhibition number AW105

Audio guide

Have you ever been in a dark nightclub, where the effects of a light show flit across faces, transform them and make them look unfamiliar? You feel the same as always, but the view from the outside is quite different. You have no say in how your own face is illuminated at any given moment, what patterns are flickering across it. That's the kind of situation evoked by Toyin Ojih Odutola's picture. But the artist is actually hinting at a much more profound, existential experience. Born and raised in Nigeria, she was nine when her family emigrated to the United States.

“Before that, being black and African was just part of the cornucopia of what made me and I was treated based on my performance. But when I moved to Alabama, I realized my performance no longer mattered because my skin suddenly spoke for me. I realized it would impact how people treated and responded to me and that continued into my adulthood.” - Quote Toyin Ojih Odutola

In her art, Toyin Ojih Odutola's explores the experience of being treated differently because of skin colour. She also addresses issues linked to the search for identity in a new country with a different culture. How much of your own identity can you live out? How much of it is made up of memories? To what extent is it shaped by external factors?

Toyin Ojih Odutola often works from photographs for her portraits. But she doesn't copy them precisely, so that each image develops into something unique as it is being created.

Further artworks from this exhibition