OOA Gallery is proud to present Lessons in Selfhood, a capsule exhibition by Evans Mbugua curated by Sabo Kpade, showing at the 19th edition of Art Madrid, from 6th to 10th 2024. 

Marking his debut appearance at Spain’s foremost art fair, Mbugua (b. 1979) has created a new set of paintings and large scale installation for the gallery’s booth and the entrance of Galería de Cristal of the Palacio de Cibeles in Downtown Madrid. The exhibition is part of OOA Gallery’s joint booth with Cameroonian painter Ajarb Bernard Ategwa and Beninese sculptor Rėmy Samuz. The three sets of works in Lessons in Selfhood — We are all Spinning round the Same Sun [Act 2] (2023), Cousinhood Gimmicks (2024) and Alternation (2024) — brings to conclusion Mbugua’s long-standing series Back to the Future (2018-2024), his exploration of the “age of life”, childhood and child-rearing practices, youth and adolescence.

Lessons in Selfhood is predicated on three principles: as visual anthropology for artistic inquiries; as additional source history for adolescence and, lastly, as new, artistic interpretations of childhood in the early 21st century. The works in the show exemplify Mbugua’s fascination with perspex and its material qualities, at the same time interrogating the powers of portraiture, and the chromatic possibilities of colour. Often described as “cosmic pop art”, Mbugua’s design complex references the use of colour in British and American pop art, persistent ideas about portraiture and Abstract Expressionism of the 20th century, textiles patterns and weaving techniques from East and West Africa.

Once the subject of inquiry for Ionian philosophers of the sixth century B.C, the “age of life” in modern times has become what French historian Phillipe Arèis refers to as “common property” — positive societal concepts that have transitioned from scientific studies to quotidian experiences. Lessons in Selfhood is staged as a theatre of memory and as scenes of future wonderment, further defined by a set of factors that include: the importance of childhood experiences on artists throughout art history; the artist’s own ambivalent identifications with Paris and Nairobi; and the notion of individualism as foundational for civic duties and social ecologies. Broadly, Mbugua’s inventive renditions depict nascency as a synecdoche for life cycles and human
existence as a whole.

Alternation is installed at the entrance of Galería de Cristal of the Palacio de Cibeles, adjoining OOA Gallery’s booth at Art Madrid 2024. The triptych is accompanied by an outsized pictogram of a man and child, an emblematic motif in Mbugua’s paintings inspired by data visualisations on Nairobi’s metropolitan streets, synergising correlations between graphic symbology and life cycles across generations.