To Carry My Cross: Aaron Kudi @ 1-54 NY

Starrett-Lehigh Building, New York, 14 - 17 May 2026 
Overview
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Booth 17
Adegbola Gallery presents Aaron Kudi at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, New York, 2026, marking the gallery’s first presentation at the fair. The booth features a new body of work by the Nigeria-born artist, who lives and works in London and is completing his MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in June 2026.
 
The presentation centers on paintings that explore what it means to remain psychologically and morally present in a world marked by suffering. Informed by Gethsemane, the works paint the residue of suffering through silence, dread, endurance, and the strain of continued witness. Across the presentation, pain appears as something absorbed, carried, and lived with, leaving its weight on the surface.
 
Working on glazed tarpaulin and cotton duck canvas, Kudi builds his surfaces through liquid metal, ink, enamel, and acrylic. Layering, settling, cracking, and erosion shape each composition, guided by a sustained attention to process, repetition, and restraint. His paintings develop through close observation of material behavior, in which pressure, control, and release remain in active relation.
 
Set within antique gold frames, the paintings enter into deliberate tension with the European institutional structures that have historically shaped how painting is framed and received. At the same time, Kudi’s practice draws ancestral visual knowledge into conversation with the formal language of international abstraction. This places the work within a broader modernist history shaped through non-Western perspectives, bringing local systems of knowledge into dialogue with abstraction.
 
Titles such as Pillars of the Firmament, Syllables for a Midnight Vigil, and Hymn to the Heavy Root extend the presentation’s interest in time, transformation, and interior states. 
 
Presented by Adegbola Gallery, a Lagos-based gallery with a program grounded in research, historical continuity, and rigorous curatorial thinking, the booth reflects the gallery’s commitment to artists whose practices are shaped by material intelligence and sustained inquiry.
Works
Press release
Aaron Kudi, Aporia of the Molten Core, 2026
Aaron Kudi, Aporia of the Molten Core, 2026
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