Inside Out

‘As a Nigerian artist, I feel it an honor to provide assistance with a donation to what will become the second Pavilion for Nigeria at the Venice Biennale in 2024. I will be donating my newest print, “Inside Out” (2022) to benefit The Museum of West African Art, (MOWAA) during Christie’s upcoming 20/21st Century auction this October at Frieze London. In addition to benefitting the Nigeria Pavilion, I understand that proceeds of this sale will contribute to the construction of MOWAA’s Rainforest Gallery, and the equipping and programming for the forthcoming Creative District. With gratitude and wishing great success.’

– ODILI DONALD ODITA

Christie’s and the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) in Nigeria are collaborating to raise funds for MOWAA and its initiatives to create a cultural ecosystem in Benin City, based on the art of the past, present and future. A number of artists have generously agreed to donate original works of art to the auction, including Yinka Shonibare, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Lakwena Maciver and Victor Ehikhamenor. Proceeds from the sale of the works will go towards MOWAA initiatives including the presentation of the Nigeria Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia, 2024—commissioned by the Governor of Edo State and also curated by Aindrea Emelife—and the 20-acre Creative Campus, including the Rainforest Gallery. Designed by the Dakar-based architecture firm Worofila, the Rainforest Gallery will be dedicated to showcasing Modern and Contemporary art, as well as historic exhibitions.

Odili Donald Odita’s work navigates the artist’s experience of dual identity. Odita culls inspiration for his work from art history, digital technologies, contemporary artistic discourses and personal narratives such as the oral histories of his Nigerian ancestry. Moving to New York in the early 1990s Odita recognised a conversant artistic project in its billboard aesthetic and the way in which it captured the intensity and vibrancy of the city through fragmented images and waves of colour.

Throughout Odita’s decades-long career, he has rigorously explored the properties of colour, mixing paints intuitively by hand so that no two shades are ever completely identical. Odita’s luminous works examine how colour can reflect, refract, and ultimately articulate contemporary life. Adopting a tapestry-like compositional strategy, Odita holds up colour as a mirror to the complexity of the world around him, weaving together myriad personal and universal histories. The artist conceives of his work like the scrambled reception of a television set, from which disconnected images both familiar and alien might overlap and interact.

Recent museum exhibitions of Odita’s work have been held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2021), the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (2020) and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2019). His work is held in permanent collections of institutions including the Perez Art Museum, Miami; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Odita lives and works in Philadelphia.