ART CITIES: London-Uman

Uman’s self-taught practice is not miraculous, but a rare fusion of instinct and discipline. Her gut sensibilities are rooted in the ritual of painting every day, teaching herself to generate both incrementally and monumentally. She feels that, “When I am painting, I know exactly what I am doing,” a declaration of confidence in a lifelong effort dedicated to developing her style and voice. Uman is committed to the limitless realms of her mind’s eye, just as her artwork is a throng of paradoxes—instinctive yet formulaic, lucid yet complex, and crafted from infinity, but nevertheless complete.

By EfiMIchalarou
Photo: Hauser & Wirth Gallery Archive

“Darling sweetie, sweetie darling”, Uman’s first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth takes place in London, in equal partnership with Nicola Vassell Gallery, NY. Uman’s ebullient visual vocabulary reflects her expansive cross-cultural experiences. Born in Somalia and raised in Kenya, she emigrated to Denmark as a teenager and later to New York as a young adult. Now living and working in upstate New York, Uman paints lavishly detailed, opulently colored worlds replete with gesture, geometry and evocations of the sublime. While these works are executed primarily with oil paint, she also combines acrylic paint, oil stick and collage techniques. An intuitive artist and voracious autodidact, Uman draws upon her memories of her East African childhood, rigorous education in traditional Arabic calligraphy, deep engagement with dreams and fascination with kaleidoscopic color and design. With nods to self-portraiture and fictional topographies, Uman’s paintings fluidly navigate in-between realms to explore both the physical and spiritual, intertwining abstraction, figuration, meditative patterning and a reverence for the natural world. Accompanying the exhibition, a public programme will engage visitors with key themes of Uman’s work. In 2015, Uman’s first solo exhibition opened at White Columns, attracting significant attention for her paintings, sculptures and assemblage works that dazzled with their unorthodox and wholly original approach to layering cross-cultural, art historical and textile-based references. Uman’s work synthesizes the various cultures in which she has lived, with her experiences finding their way into recurring motifs: animals of the East African desert, patterns evoking Somalian hand-woven fabrics, Nordic environments from her time in Denmark, the urban landscape of Manhattan, the starry skies in upstate New York. Since 2020, Uman has divided her time between Albany and the rural community of Roseboom, places that together form the center of her life and work. The natural world continues to directly inform her art through the physical and psychological shifts of the landscape, contributing to her fictional topographies. The element of self-portraiture permeates Uman’s practice. As she says, ‘I think everything I do now is a self-portrait in different ways. Even my abstract paintings, mythical in nature, are self- portraits. I love drama, and so I depict myself with several mouths, and several eyes, just like a creature.’ This kind of autobiographical transfiguration is seen in works such as ‘Grand Dame Uman’ (2022) and ‘Hell in Heels’ (2022). ‘Amapiano Dance’ (2022-23) is a visual evocation of a well-known genre of South African dance music beloved by the artist—an indirect portrait of the sources of inspiration that give shape to her life and imagination. Uman privileges saturated colors, combining bright jewel tones alongside darker hues in surprising ways. Her mastery of pigments makes possible a trajectory between past and present. ‘They come from my past,’ she explains. ‘I grew up with colorful women, a colorful culture. East African and Somali people love color more than anything. I’ve kept that in me, living here in the West, and I’m using that in my work to tell a story’. The artist’s process begins with the repeated layering of these colors, followed by a removal of paint via minimal but resolute gestures. This approach heightens the materiality of Uman’s works. ‘I find beauty in the canvas itself,’ she has said about the practice of leaving some of her canvases unprimed. ‘It’s a beautiful strong material that sometimes needs to participate in the painting’. In addition to prolific iconography from her own memories and dreams, Uman uses geometric forms, dots and abstract patterning that resembles mycelial networks. These collide with anthropomorphic elements to culminate in depictions that are at once botanical and intergalactic. The recent painting ‘Samone’ (2023) features a grid of intricately patterned abstractions interspersed with triangulations that are each embellished with a singular all-seeing eye. These exuberant, seemingly freestyle markings recall the Arabic calligraphy Uman studied as a child: ‘When I see how I draw, or scribble or doodle—it always has a slant, like Islamic calligraphy.’ The resulting marks coalesce into Uman’s own highly distinctive language of symbols.

Photo: Uman, Good Morning, 2023, Acrylic, oil and oil stick on canvas, 212.7 x 364.8 x 3.8 cm / 83 3/4 x 143 5/8 x 1 1/2 in, Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer, © Uman, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Gallery

Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 23 Savile Row, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 30/1-30/3/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com/