Skoto Gallery

Skoto Gallery is pleased to present Beyond Words, an exhibition of recent paintings by the Ethiopia-born artist Wosene Worke Kosrof. This will be his eighth solo exhibition at the gallery. The artist will be present at the reception on Thursday, February 12, 6-8pm. Wosene Worke Kosrof’s recent work continues his long-standing exploration of the interplay between language, identity, aesthetic beauty and material using the language symbols of Amharic, one of the few ancient written systems in Africa as a core compositional element. His work is dense with visual complexity that reflects an awareness of a vast array of both formal and inherited traditions. He relieves words of conventional meanings and, instead, explores their aesthetic, sensual, and visual content to speak boldly and clearly to a universal audience. With Amharic calligraphy, Wosene explores the aesthetic dimensions of the script rather than producing legible text. “I am seeking the poetic or artistic value of the “fiedel” or language symbols themselves, and I see my work as visual poetry. The writings in my painting do not tell a literal story, but rather a visual story. The Amharic “fiedel” are extremely beautiful and have rhythmic and dancing forms. I “choreograph” them on canvas, I cut them apart, turn them upside down, repeat sections of them to discover the beauty of written language and to think about how we communicate. I communicate with color, line and composition, rather than with sounds, conventional words and literal narratives”. Wosene (his professional name) was born 1950 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and received a BFA from The School of Fine Art, Addis Ababa and an MFA from Howard University, Washington DC in 1980. He is an artist of international reputation, widely exhibited in Africa, Europe, Japan, the US and the Caribbean. Selected museum exhibitions include: Keith Haring Museum of Japan, Kobuchizawa, Japan, 2017; Sharjah Museum Calligraphy Biennial, UAE, 2014; Transformations: Recent Contemporary African Art Acquisitions, Fowler Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 2009; Newark Museum, Newark, NJ 2004; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC 2004; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; and Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, Whitechapel Gallery, London 1995. Collections include the National Museum of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa; The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; The Newark Museum, Newark, NJ; The Neuberger Museum at Purchase, NY; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN; Keith Haring Museum of Japan, Kobuchizawa; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; Fowler Museum, UCLA, CA; Samuel P. Harn Museum, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL; and The Voelkerkunde Museum, Zurich, Switzerland as well as many international private and corporate collections. *Three Perspectives on the Art of Wosene In his book The Spell of the Sensuous, ecologist and philosopher David Abram has suggested that all languages and alphabets arise out of specific physical landscapes, but they can also become an unconscious replacement for that landscape. For Abram, language and writing can become a veil between us and the sensual or natural world, replacing our direct contact with that world with a text. We then live vicariously through our written language and have lost contact with a great living mystery, or in Abram’s words, the “spell of the sensuous.” Using the Amharic alphabet and written language as his foundation, Wosene takes us on the return journey of making the script/word/letter become landscape again, not its replacement. (When I refer) to Wosene as an artist/ scribe, I mean ‘scribe’ in the deepest Pharaonic Egyptian sense of the keeper of the wisdom of the world. Wosene has done more than a modern deconstruction of the box that language has been put in. He is returning us to another way of understanding the mystery, magic, and power of language, the oldest way of philosophizing about language. In the ancient view each letter was magical, each letter had a power, each letter constructed something and could stand on its own, or it could join with other letters/symbols and could create something else, something of power, grace, and beauty. Wosene is playing with powerful forces, but most of all he is not playing at all. Although there is humor in his work and at times a joyful juxtaposition of signs and symbols, his intentions are serious. Wosene is concerned with…the expansion of the boundaries of art and consciousness. Daniel Dawson Independent Curator New York City Exploring the temporal and spatial dimensions of script has led Wosene to experiment with its deployment in constructions of place and identity. In his art, Amharic becomes an elastic means for communicating across the limits of time, place, and culture. While Wosene’s Ethiopian descent informs his practice in significant ways, it does not define him or his art as essentially ‘African’ or ‘Ethiopian’. The tendency to see the work of non-Western contemporary artists as representative of the artist’s culture of origin not only limits the narrative possibilities of the work; it also locks the artist out of time and place, reducing him, his agency, his very history, to a stereotype that privileges tradition over modernity, the local over the global, and permanence over transience. If anything, it is precisely because Wosene’s work is loosely biographical that it cannot be reduced to any one place, impulse, or time. Having lived outside Ethiopia since the late 1970s, the artist draws from all the places he has called home, and as such, he resists fixed and facile labels of identity. Allyson Purpura, Ph.D. Senior Curator and Curator of Global African Arts Krannert Art Museum University of Illinois, Champaign, IL Wosene’s use of Amharic…breaks from the traditional use of writing as mere verbal support in iconic paintings, scrolls or seals. In Wosene’s work, the language itself becomes the subject matter, and each letter can evoke reverence for a culture in those that read the canvas. They contain and convey expanding realms of possibilities and make possible relationships between diverse forms and senses, bringing together smell, flavor, music, gesture, and art itself in their de-fragmentation, Wosene’s paintings are ultimately sensory experiences. They contain texture and surfaces that turn their viewing into a tactile experience of sorts for the eyes. Not satisfied with merely providing the viewer with something to look at, Wosene’s work demands engagement, drawing one into the experience of the painting itself. His use of space, motion, and the constant splitting, replicating, and mutating of his fractal designs necessarily involves one’s sense of balance and direction, while the explosions of color and angles engender a visceral reaction to something akin to sound and flavor. Bárbaro Mártinez-Ruíz, Ph.D. Artist/Art Historian, African Arts Department of Art History Indiana University Bloomington Bloomington, IN *Culled from catalog published in conjunction with the exhibition “Words: From Spoken to Seen: The Art of Wosene Worke Kosrof. Foreward by C. Daniel Dawson; Curated by art historians Allyson Purpura and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, Mexican Heritage Plaza; San Jose, CA, April 12-June 30, 2006 Pictured: Wosene Kosrof-Blues Alley III, 2024, acrylic on linen, 28x32 inches

Radiant Rays and Shifting Sands Amoda. Anidi. Blocton. Diako Lebowitz. Leys. McCarthy. Nayo Nosseir. Pefura. Rich. Wynter November 20, 2025 – January 31, 2026 Skoto Gallery is pleased to present “Radiant Rays and Shifting Sands”, a group exhibition that brings together works in various media including drawings, paintings, sculpture, photography and works on paper by an international group of established and emerging artists. The opening reception is Thursday, November 20, 6-8pm The exhibition, titled "Radiant Rays and Shifting Sands," reflects the diverse backgrounds, experiences, and styles of the participating artists, while simultaneously alluding to the vitality and creative energy that runs through their work in a time of changing circumstances. Despite their varied traditions and personal cultural backgrounds, each of these artists responds to the notion of a classical or canonic Western modernism. They either embrace it or find individual ways to critique it. What makes this collection particularly compelling is the evident struggle, the process of seeking and discovery, as each artist strives to find a personal and essential relationship to this pervasive, transcultural vision. Obiora Anidi (b. 1957) is a celebrated Nigerian sculptor from the Uli tradition and one of the founding members of the famous AKA Circle of Exhibiting Artists. Often paired with ambiguous titles, Anidi’s powerful sculptures transform physical experiences into nuanced abstract and formal language. He is a widely exhibited artist whose work is recognized and prized in numerous private and public collections at home and abroad. He graduated with an HND in Fine and Applied Art and Sculpture from the Institute of Management and Technology (IMT), Enugu, Nigeria in 1982. He also holds Masters and Doctorate degrees in Educational Technology from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and Enugu State University of Technology, respectively. Lula Mae Blocton is an African American artist and painter. Color is her passion. What she has been dealing with is the quality of color, looking at it and perceiving it as transparent. Throughout her career she has tried to identify herself using color relationships and structure. Her work can be seen as specific stages of developing towards these goals. Lula’s early work consisted of overlapping geometric patterns creating transparent combinations of color, much like weaving cloth to create a pattern. Her work is in several collections including the Mott-Warsh Collection, Flint. MI; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH. She is included in the upcoming inaugural Aldrich Decennial: I Am What is Around Me, June 7, 2026 - January 3, 2027, at The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT. Gerard McCarthy’s ceramic work is a meditation on the skillful manipulation of line, volume and mass, depth and shallowness. The forms may be viewed as miniature architectural structures, alluding to dynamic qualities of inhabitable buildings, both private and public. A unifying element in this body of work is the application of white terra sigillata, an ancient technique of coating the clay in a liquid of suspended clay particles. His composition is pure enough to approach an abstract sensibility yet layered with a poetic meaning for the observer.

Enos Williams Turning Green Blue is Alchemy November 6-15, 2025 Skoto Gallery is pleased to present Enos Williams: Turning Green Blue is Alchemy, a memorial exhibition for friend and artist Enos Williams 1958-2024. We invite you to join us for the reception on Thursday, November 6, 6-8pm. Enos Williams earned his Bachelor of Arts in Sculpture with a minor in Italian from SUNY, Albany in 1992, followed by an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995. His formative years in New York, a multicultural city, shaped experiences that blended personal and collective memories with keen curiosity and willingness to connect with individuals from all backgrounds on an equal footing. In his own words: My parents were foreigners from two different countries; they met in a third and started a family in New York. My sister and I read far more at home than in class. I went to high school on Manhattan's Lower East Side, between the old Hebrew section, Little Italy and Chinatown. We had all kinds of friends. For us culture and difference meant fascination and discernment. My sister and I started travelling alone early. Before we were teenagers, we knew about exchange rates, visas and making friends far from home. A deeply sensitive artist, Williams explored the tension between contained energy and boundless space. He paid tribute to oral traditions, unwritten histories, and identity while consistently avoiding mere evocation of the past in his work. He possessed an inimitable ability to unite color, light, and surface, pushing the boundaries of his aesthetic to create works of remarkable elegance and lyrical beauty. His modestly scaled drawings, focusing on mood and color, utilized grease pencil and oil sticks to build highly textured, waxy surfaces. He would then rub off parts of the top layers to reveal unforeseen chance effects, resulting in abstract, painterly pieces that draw on the inherent possibilities of his process. Although their visual impact is greatest from a distance, a closer look offers a rewarding experience and palpable sensations, evocative of the expansive possibilities of life and art. Enos Williams was a versatile artist whose virtuosic ability to create exquisite forms drew from architecture and design. His process was physically and conceptually steeped in memory, history, and the passage of time. His sculpture and design work combined minimalist concepts with strong compositional organization, reflecting a subtle understanding of context and an awareness of the relationship between function and experimentation. By imbuing mundane materials, marks, and processes with surprising significance and intricate design, his work transformed into extraordinary visual poetry that evinced clarity of intent, allowing the viewer freedom of imagination, interpretation, and emotional response. Enos Williams traveled and exhibited his work widely both in the US and in Europe. We extend our sincere gratitude to Sean Grandits, Masoud Ghandehari, and Nick Mellen for their generosity in lending their works to the exhibition.

Press Release LeRone Wilson The Stars of the Universe September 18 – November 1, 2025 Skoto Gallery is pleased to present LeRone Wilson: The Stars of the Universe, a solo exhibition of recent works by the American sculptor, LeRone Wilson. This will be his first solo presentation at the gallery. We invite you to join us for the reception on Thursday, September 18, 6-8pm, where the artist will be in attendance. For over three decades, LeRone Wilson has dedicated his practice to exploring the artistic potential of beeswax, a medium renowned for its versatility, depth, and unique textural qualities, and notably used by ancient Kemetic civilizations in their art. A prolific artist, Wilson masterfully blends nature and imagination demonstrating a profound sensitivity to texture, a deep understanding of tonality and color, and an inimitable ability to create cohesive and vigorous bodies of work that reflect intense contemplation. Wilson’s wall sculptures are built through an iterative process, as he delves into an independent system of artmaking and design principles. His approach consciously balances material, color, form, and technique. Through years of refining his encaustic technique, he has produced remarkable abstract wall sculptures that expertly exploit the ambiguity that arises between abstract shapes and imagery as well as the intriguing play between formal intention and narrative potential As the artist describes, “I create my work by melting a mixture of beeswax, honey, powder pigment, propolis, carnauba wax, and resin, which I then make all in one solvent. I apply the mixture to the panel (or whatever surface I choose) with an assortment of palette knives to build up the surface then fuse each layer with heat. After the wax is completely hardened, I use carving tools that I created to make specific patterns into the wax. The alchemy of combining mineralized powder pigment with beeswax is fundamental to my process where the right temperature and the pigment to wax ratio determine the resulting texture. The application process of adding wax is very physical, time-consuming, and extremely detailed.” The result is a minimal, translucent, and highly textured surface imbued with remarkable elegance and lyrical beauty. While the visual impact is striking from a distance, a closer examination offers rewarding experience and palpable sensations, evoking the expansive possibilities inherent in both life and art. For Wilson, Beeswax serves as a powerful medium for exploring history, identity and authenticity while expanding the possibility of working creatively without disrupting the purity of the material. The significance of bees to civilization is well-documented, particularly in current discussions about environmental and climate change. However, honey, wax, and bees held profound importance in Kemet society. Some even believed that the human soul, or “ka,” could take the form of a bee. Equally important to the Kemetic culture was their relationship with the sun, moon and the stars (Ra, Eah and Spdt (spa-det), All the works in the show reflect Kemetic names given to these celestial bodies. LeRone Wilson is a distinguished artist with a strong exhibition history. He was a finalist for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and a winner of Best in Show for the Carroll Harris Sims Award. In 2011, he received the Bombay Sapphire Artisan Award during Art Basel Miami week, triumphing over 4,000 artists nationwide. His notable engagements include being featured in the Special Projects section of Art New York in 2019, participating in the Pierce and Hill Harper Foundation Artist Residency in Detroit, and contributing to the 2020 Uptown Triennial at Columbia University’s Wallach Gallery. Wilson’s works have also been included in exhibitions at several institutions such as the Museum of Biblical Art in New York and the African American Museum in Dallas among others. His work is in several private and public collections across the country. Wilson is a graduate of The University of Illinois-Chicago’s School of Art and Design (1994) and LeRone Wilson is a distinguished artist with a global exhibition history. He was a finalist for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and a winner of Best in Show for the Carroll Harris Sims Award. In 2011, he received the Bombay Sapphire Artisan Award during Art Basel Miami week, triumphing over 4,000 artists nationwide. His notable engagements include being featured in the Special Projects section of Art New York in 2019, participating in the Pierce and Hill Harper Foundation Artist Residency in Detroit, and contributing to the 2020 Uptown Triennial at Columbia University’s Wallach Gallery. Wilson’s works have also been included in exhibitions at several institutions such as the Museum of Biblical Art in New York and the African American Museum in Dallas among others. His work is in several private and public collections across the country. Wilson is a graduate of The University of Illinois-Chicago’s School of Art and Design (1994) he lives and works in New York City.

Group Show Afi Nayo. Ahmed Nosseir. Bernard Guillot. Bruce Onobrakpeya. Cathy Lebowitz. David Rich. Diako. Fathi Hassan. Katherine Taylor. Khalid Kodi. Lula Mae Blocton. Michael Marshall. Olu Amoda. Piniang. Rosemary Karuga SoHyun Bae. Sophie Leys. Trokon Nagbe. Uche Okeke. Wosene Kosrof. Juliana Zevallos May 29 – July 26, 2025 Skoto Gallery is pleased to present Group Show, an exhibition that brings together works by a diverse group of established and emerging artists working in a variety of media including painting, drawing, photography and sculpture. The reception is on Thursday, May 29, 6-8pm With a mix of abstraction and sensitive realism that combines technical accomplishment with strong aesthetic appeal, the artists in this exhibition work across different time-periods and styles. Each of the artists re-imagines history, inheritance and vast possibilities in their work through the lens of individual and collective experiences, offering fresh perspectives that reflect the complexities and realities of contemporary identity. Each artist utilizes a particular rigor and economy which encourages a clarity of intent and simplicity of execution. Afi Nayo’s (b. 1969, Lome, Togo) work is intensely personal and displays a blend of fragility, modesty and refinement. She uses pyro gravure and mixed media technique on wood panel to create pictures that consist of fantastic dream images, wit and imagination as well as overtones of fantasy and satire. They are dense with sensual surfaces, formal rigors and color harmonies that demonstrate a playful openness to art historical influences, while simultaneously encouraging multiple layers of meanings. She uses a complex language of symbols and signs drawn from the unconscious to obtain a poetic amalgam of abstraction and reality. She presently divides her time between Paris, France and Lome, Togo. Trokon Nagbe draws on themes of memory, migration, history and the passage of time through the filter of personal experience. Firmly rooted in a framework of references that reflect his African heritage, he strives to push the bounds of his aesthetic while exploring intricate, and often paradoxical, relationship between the material and the spiritual, collective and the individual identity as well as the interior and the exterior. The visual resonance in his work is undeniable, attesting to his ability to seamlessly fuse ancient and modern concepts and aesthetic on new and innovative modes of representation while still contesting the meanings of the post-modern encounter between tradition and modernity. Juliana Zevallos uses a wide range of media including her background as a versatile printmaker to create complex and poetic works layered with meaning and surface texture where some overlapping forms are fully present while other forms are partially obscured. They are simple, serene and as mature as thought. Closely viewed, her work is an invitation for contemplation that strives to reconcile intelligence and sensibility, knowledge and intuition as well as matter and spirit. Lula Mae Blocton is an African American artist and painter. Color is her passion. What she has been dealing with is the quality of color, looking at it and perceiving it as transparent. Throughout her career she has tried to identify herself through the use of color relationships and structure. Her work can be seen as specific stages of developing towards these goals. Lula’s early work consisted of overlapping geometric patterns creating transparent combinations of color, much like weaving cloth to create a pattern. Uche Okeke (1933-2016) Renowned for his immense contribution to the development of modern Nigerian art and pioneering visual experimentations with traditional Igbo Uli mural and body design, Uche Okeke’s early drawings in graphite, charcoal or ink are pure meditations upon the nature of line itself. A master of lyrical and sensitive lines, he uses resplendent curves and fluid lines to convey the true harmonies of his artistic vision. His work is in several permanent collections including the National Gallery, Lagos, Nigeria, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Newark Museum, Newark, NJ; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; The High Museum, Atlanta, GA, Iwalewa Haus, Bayreuth, Germany. He was included in the exhibition Stranieri Ovunque-Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Venice Italy. .

Skoto Gallery is pleased to present Magic Box, an exhibition of recent drawings and paintings by the Nigeria-born artist Osi Audu. This is his sixth solo exhibition at the gallery. The reception is on Thursday, March 20th, 6-8pm. The artist will be present. Osi Audu’s recent work builds on his long-standing exploration of the dynamic relationship between line, form and color while remaining firmly rooted in the Yoruba philosophical concept of the human head as the locus of dreams, imagination and phenomenal experiences. Like the Magic Box, the human head holds a very powerful fascination for the artist, which has to do with its significance as a site of one’s identity and seat of the brain which coordinates the activities of the body including perception and communication. He uses his poetic sensibility effectively to explore his highly conceptual imagery of the head as a container of consciousness, combining minimalist geometric and organic forms with achromatic and contrasting colors to further underscore the interplay of the conscious, subconscious and superconscious in experiential responses, thereby obliging the viewer to look beyond the surface for deeper meanings. Osi Audu’s work demonstrates unassuming techniques and depth of resonance. He combines complex compositional organization with spatial dynamics that eschew flatness, with a strong conviction in the spiritual energy of color to create works that continue to refine and re-define the language of abstraction. There is a physical as well as an emotional presence in his work that brings together a hierarchy of forms drawn from a range of sources including nature, classical African art, geometry and science combined with a willingness to reduce forms and ideas to their essence while simultaneously preserving an overall fluency, energy and beauty inherent throughout the body of work in this exhibition. There is a clarity of form in his work that is highly characteristic and easily recognizable. Osi Audu’s work has been shown in numerous international exhibitions including Kwangju Biennale; Venice Biennale; The Africa-America exhibition at the Tobu Museum, Japan and the Museum of the Mind at the British Museum. He was educated in Nigeria and the United States. His work is in several public and private collections including the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, The Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ. The British Museum, Horniman Museum and Wellcome Trust, all in London; The Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire and the Mott-Warsh Collection, Flint. Michigan, among others. Corporate collections include SONY Classical, New York; Fidelity Investment Corporation, Boston, MA

SKOTO GALLERY 529 West 20th Street, 5FL. New York, NY 10011 212-352 8058 info@skotogallery.com www.skotogallery.com Khalid Kodi Out of Place: Alternative Landscapes and Other Stories January 30 – March 15, 2025 Skoto Gallery is pleased to present Out of Place: Alternative Landscapes and Other Stories, an exhibition of recent works by the Sudanese-born artist Khalid Kodi. This will be his third solo show at the gallery. The reception is on Thursday, January 30, 6-8pm. The artist will be present. Out of Place is a conceptual exploration of the dynamic interplay between nature and human perception. These alternative landscapes challenge traditional notions of place and expand the boundaries of how we perceive and interact with the environment. Through fluid forms, vibrant gestures, and abstracted terrains, the works invite us to step beyond the static imagery of landscapes and enter a world of endless possibilities—where nature is not merely observed but continuously rearranged, imagined, and co-created. This exhibition examines the moments when nature escapes definition. Here, nature is both static and mutable, an entity we encounter and rearrange—sometimes with intention, sometimes in unconscious gestures, and other times in states of playful disruption. “Out of Place” reflects a search for that which lies beyond the known—a place of desire, comfort, majesty, love, and even madness. It asks: What happens when we deconstruct landscapes? When we let our minds wander through imagined terrains? When we infuse our interactions with nature with elements of whimsy, chaos, and longing? The abstract compositions of Out of Place reject the rigidity of fixed landscapes. Instead, they propose an alternative: a fluid interplay of color, form, and movement. Swirling brushstrokes, scattered patterns, and unexpected juxtapositions evoke a sense of both familiarity and dislocation. These are not landscapes we know; they are landscapes we dream of, where natural forms and human interventions collide, merge, and transform. At its core, this collection is a meditation on the human tendency to shape and be shaped by the natural world. It celebrates the tension between control and surrender, order and chaos. In these works, we find a mirror of our own restless curiosity and our constant quest to reimagine the spaces we inhabit. Out of Place: Alternative Landscapes and Other Stories is an invitation to explore the profound interplay of perception, imagination, and the natural world. Through this exhibition, viewers are encouraged to reflect on their own relationship with landscapes—both the ones they know and the ones they yearn to create. Born in Sudan, Khalid Kodi is an accomplished artist who has lived and worked in the US since the early 1990s. He is an educator, a public intellectual, and a cultural critic who has emerged as a central figure working on multi/cross cultural concepts. A pioneer of Participatory Art, he uses visual language to address social change issues and facilitate communication between communities, including communities in conflict and individuals who are not literate. Kodi uses art as a mechanism to create a platform for dialogue on constructions of identity across racial, gender socio-economic, and other forms of difference, co-existence, justice and peace. His work has been widely exhibited with critical acclaim.

Africa in Portraits Afi Nayo. Bernard Guillot. Bruce Onobrakpeya Chriss Nwobu. Mor Faye. Osaretin Ighile. Romain Ganer. Sokari Douglas Camp. Trokon Nagbe. Uche Okeke November 21, 2024 – January 25, 2025 Skoto Gallery is pleased to present Africa in Portraits, a group show that brings together works by a diverse group of established and emerging African artists working in a variety of media including painting, drawing, photography and sculpture. The reception is on Thursday, November 21, 2024 With a mix of abstraction and sensitive realism that combines technical accomplishment with strong aesthetic appeal, this exhibition brings together works by ten African artists working across different time-period. Each of the artists re-imagines history, inheritance and vast possibilities in their work through the lens of individual and collective experiences, offering fresh perspectives that reflect the complexities and realities of contemporary identity. Each artist utilizes a particular rigor and economy which encourages a clarity of intent and simplicity of execution. Afi Nayo’s (b. 1969, Lome, Togo) work is intensely personal and displays a blend of fragility, modesty and refinement. She uses pyro gravure and mixed media technique on wood panel to create pictures that consist of fantastic dream images, wit and imagination as well as overtones of fantasy and satire. They are dense with sensual surfaces, formal rigors and color harmonies that demonstrate a playful openness to art historical influences while simultaneously encouraging multiple layers of meanings. She uses a complex language of symbols and signs drawn from the unconscious to obtain a poetic amalgam of abstraction and reality. She presently divides her time between Paris, France and Lome, Togo. Mor Faye (Dakar Senegal, 1947-1984) was a versatile and complex artist whose ability to express a vivid interior existence while simultaneously opening to some of the larger issues of our time was reflected consistently in his work throughout his career. As an artist, Mor Faye absorbed and engaged the outside world, drawing from a multitude of sources yet claiming allegiance to none. Since his death in 1984 at the age of 37, Mor Faye’s reputation as a troubled artistic genius has reached mythic proportions. A prolific artist, he lived a short and very productive life and left behind a rich body of work that will help liberate as well as enrich contemporary thinking in Africa. Sokari Douglas Camp is a groundbreaking artist whose works combine motion with history, culture and contemporary global politics. Her work is predominantly sculpted in steel and draws inspiration from her Nigerian roots and international issues. Perhaps best known for kinetic life-size welded steel sculptures of Kalabari masquerades, Sokari Douglas Camp sculptural practice defines gender and cultural stereotypes. She was the recipient of a Henry Moore Bursary in 1983 and was selected as a finalist for London 4th Plinth in 2003. In 2005, Douglas Camp was honored as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her career in the arts. Her work is held by the American Museum of Natural History, New York, British Museum, Setagaya Art Museum, Japan and the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. Uche Okeke (1933-2016) Renowned for his immense contribution to the development of modern Nigerian art and pioneering visual experimentations with traditional Igbo Uli mural and body design, Uche Okeke’s early drawings in graphite, charcoal or ink are pure meditations upon the nature of line itself. A master of lyrical and sensitive lines, he uses resplendent curves and fluid lines to convey the true harmonies of his artistic vision. His work is included in several permanent collections including the National Gallery, Lagos, Nigeria, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Newark Museum, Newark, NJ; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; The High Museum, Atlanta, GA, Iwalewa Haus, Bayreuth, Germany. He was included in the exhibition Stranieri Ovunque-Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Venice Italy.

SoHyun Bae Choong Sup Lim Wind, Water, Stone September 19 – November 2, 2024 Skoto Gallery is pleased to present Wind, Water, Stone, a two-person exhibition of recent works by Korean American artists SoHyun Bae and Choong Sup Lim. This will be their first two-person exhibition at the gallery. The reception is on Thursday, September 19, 6-8pm. This exhibition encourages us to think expansively about the creative process and takes its title from a 1979 poem “Wind, Water, Stone” by the celebrated Mexican poet Octavio Paz, first published in English in The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz 1957-1987 and put together by the poet’s English translator Eliot Weinberger. The poem, as summarized by the poet Roger Caillois explores the interconnectedness and transformational qualities of water, wind, and stone. Each element interacts with and influences the others in a perpetual cycle of change. Water erodes stone over time, wind disperses water, and stone provides a barrier to the wind. These interactions illustrate the dynamic and fluid nature of existence, where each element takes on roles of creation, containment, and movement in a continuous cycle. The poem reflects on the philosophical idea that everything in the world is inter-connected and constantly evolving despite their apparent solidity or permanence. Despite their varied experiences working across different time periods, SoHyun Bae and Choong Sup Lim manage to engage in an intergenerational dialogue while continuing their long-standing commitment to the exploration of a completely personal and original style of abstraction whose true meaning lies not merely in formal arrangement but in spiritual meaning that fuels intangible ideas around human nature while simultaneously meditating on the human condition. As artists who continue to live and work in New York over several decades, they have developed a highly experimental approach to making art that combines acute awareness of the role of transnationalism in the creative process with a deep passion for exploring the nuances of their Korea America heritage to create works of universal resonance that often defy easy categorization. SoHyun Bae is Korean by birth, American by upbringing and cosmopolitan by experience. She creates mixed media works on canvas that address issues of personal and cultural identity. Her rich complex compositions draw on the visual traditions of both Asian and Western art in a manner that is neither superficial nor eclectic but rooted firmly in her belonging to both cultures. There is a lyrical beauty evocative of shifting interior and exterior spaces that belies the surprising seamlessness between the spiritual and physical worlds. There is value for spontaneity and improvisation in her work that engages the viewer directly and viscerally as ideas are distilled into swirling or meandering marks that heighten their perceptual subtlety. Bae’s work approaches a perspective universal enough to include all of us. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in Fine Arts, 2007; She was a resident artist at The Corporation of Yaddo and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, among others. Her works were exhibited worldwide in galleries and museums including the Asian Art Museum of SF, Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, Seoul Arts Center Hangaram Museum, Museo Nacional di Visual Artes in Montevideo, Sotheby’s, NYC, and Philips de Puny Luxembourg. Choong Sup Lim is a versatile artist whose work in diverse media including painting, sculpture, drawing, installation and video draws on past wisdom and future possibilities to create relevant dialogue across time. Embracing improvisation and experimentation as an ongoing conceptual approach, his work strives to reveal the subjectivity and individuality of the artist, and seeks to strike a balance between nature, object and composition. There is an intellectual rigor in his work that reflects subtle understanding of context and total control of the material he uses which makes possible an intimate integration of vision and matter. The beauty of Lim's art lies in its ability to tell stories that transcend borders and speak to universal audiences. Born 1941 in Jincheon, Chungcheong Buk-do, Choong Sup Lim graduated from Seoul National University in 1964, and moved to New York in 1973, where he continues to live and work ever since. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian’s Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art in Korea. .

The paintings of David Rich are rooted in the physicality of urban landscape and the luminous buzz of evening light. As abstract paintings, they also evoke something even more local—an intimate sense of lived experience within one’s body, including pre-verbal observations not yet coalesced into fixed images—alive and reconfiguring at the level of our synapses. Densely layered and decisively edited, these paintings set up a spatial structure that appears to shift as implied connections and ghost images assert an alternate read. Elemental constructions of interior/exterior spaces and visual dialogues of call-and-response phrases, the resulting paintings feel solid and rooted, yet open and breathing. These paintings reflect a particular attitude about improvisation that focuses not on complex elaboration, but rather on the elemental way that the parts contribute to the underlying visual statement, with a spare and concentrated economy of means in which nothing is extra, and everything is necessary. The resultant paintings take shape through inquiry and dialogue over time, becoming charged and resonant visual situations for looking at, and into—a place for durational seeing and thought. David Rich (b. 1952, Chicago) is a painter and educator living and working in Beacon, NY. His education includes Philadelphia College of Art, Kansas City Art Institute, New York Studio School Paris Session, Skowhegan and University of Oregon, MFA. Teaching includes Minneapolis College of Art and Design (1985-2010). Visiting Artist Lectures include Hartford Art School, Maryland Institute College of Art, and Universities of Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. Solo exhibitions include Skoto Gallery, NYC; Satori Fine Art, Chicago; Franz Bader Gallery, Washington DC and Bernal Gallery, Chicago. Group exhibitions include Frye Museum, Seattle; Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore; Robert Steele Gallery, NYC; Poiesis Spec, Berlin; and Grayson Gallery, Chicago. Museum collections include Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Weisman Museum, and Minnesota Museum of American Art. Private collections nationally and internationally. Pictured: Evening, Interval, 2021, oil on canvas, 48x44 inches

Skoto Gallery is pleased to present Between Moments, an exhibition of recent paintings by the American artist Christopher Wynter. This is his first solo show at the gallery. The reception is on Thursday, March 14, 6-8pm. The artist will be present. Christopher Wynter’s work continues his long-standing commitment to the exploration of color, form, and abstraction as means to expand the boundaries between art and consciousness. He draws upon an individual reserve of personal and collective memories to activate a meaningful form of engagement that celebrates the richness as well as the relationship of imagery and patterns in contemporary society. In the body of work included in this exhibition, the artist reveals an uncanny ability to reduce forms and ideas to their essence in his search for an alternative aesthetic and discursive framework that mines the nuances inherent in his use of a specific language of interacting primal shapes that are meticulously composed, shifting, overlapping, and often unresolved to create works evocative of social hierarchies. His compositions of spaces, complex but clearly structured on vertical and horizontal axes facilitates notions of containment, isolation, resolution, possibilities as well as forms not fully realized, all of which can be seen as metaphors for human social constructs and dynamics. Several of the more recent paintings, having radically reduced color, starkly create an intriguing spatial ambiguity. and dramatic journey to visually wander through very dark textured shapes contrasted with the very light spaces between. The artist is aware of the interplay of intention and accident; curiosity and discovery as well as an open-ended improvisational sensibility to create works that comes alive to convey temporal and spatial dimensions. Christopher’s extensive travels in Africa, Europe and Asia over the years have helped him to develop an approach to life and art that synthesizes into a distinct and dynamic whole the various components of his identity and create work that makes meaning of a collective history as well as the ambiguities and contradictions of contemporary culture. Funded by the Asian Cultural Council, Art International and others, he has lived and worked with artisans and artists in Cote d’Ivoire and Mali, as well as the Amis (Indigenous peoples of Taiwan), and the Ainu (indigenous people of Japan). Exhibitions include PS1/Institute of Contemporary Art, 1989, From the Studio: Artist-in-Residence, The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, 1992; Altos de Chavon, Dominican Republic, 1996; Bronx Museum of Art, 2000, Kuala Lumpur Art Center, Malasia, 2021, a Gathering of the Tribes, NYC, 2010 etc. With an interest in reaching the wider interest for public works, he has translated his language of finding meaning in non-representational and representational form and shape to sculpture and public works including glass mosaic for NYC MTA subway system; Commissioned public sculpture in wood and steel in Guatemala, Central America; Dominican Republic, Cote d’Ivoire, West Africa; Aibetsu, Japan, Hualein, Taiwan and New London, CT. He lives and works in NYC. Image: Upriver, 2024, oil on canvas, 28×24 inches