The Brooklyn Rail

Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s first solo show with Zwirner opened in the gallery’s new space on Western Avenue in Los Angeles’s Melrose Hill in May. Everything sold, but in a rare and generous move, the gallery transferred the display in its entirety to West 19th Street, resulting in the artist’s long-anticipated first solo show in New York City. The nine painstakingly produced works in this rawest of spaces in the Zwirner NYC campus are large—up to ten feet wide—and represent four years of work. They are acrylic on Rives BFK printmaking paper, with combinations of graphite, colored pencil, charcoal, or collage, and each features her signature transfer technique: photographs or an image-bank sourced from the internet are laser printed, placed face down onto the support, and rubbed with the solvent acetone from the back to force the image onto the paper. These areas are then whitewashed to soften their appearance and push them back into illusionistic depth. Despite the paintings’ scale, they are surprisingly delicate, simply hung on the wall from clips at their top edges. The surfaces are smooth, and the colors largely washed out.

Akunyili Crosby’s theme here is her experience as a transplanted Nigerian who was born in 1983 and has been in the US since she was a teen. She now lives in Los Angeles, and her work reflects the duality of her identity. Dwellers: Native One from 2019 parallels this concept in depicting non-native vegetation propagating in LA. In this camouflage-tinged picture, plants from Nigeria such as cassava and tropical almond trees blend with multiple transferred images of her own face and depictions of Nigerian pop culture, resulting in a patterned image of displacement and dedication to one’s roots. The refulgent Dwellers: Cosmopolitan Ones (2022) features plumeria native to Mexico and Central America, which immigrants brought to Southern California. The same plants have in turn proved popular in Nigeria. Persistence of Vision: Screen Walls & Fruit Tree (2022) is a daring compositional departure for the artist, with branches of a tropical almond tree spreading up and right from the lower-left corner across a poured concrete, decorative, geometric screen, an architectural accent common on mid-century modern buildings in America and, in this case, derived from the façade of a 1970s house in her ancestral village. Despite the title, comprehensive vision is occluded in this work, and the architectural screen forms a parallel to the architectonic way that she uses a buildup of transferred images as scaffolding in her pictures.

Two paintings from the ongoing, decade-long series “The Beautyful Ones” feature full-length standing young people seen against colorful backgrounds and amidst transferred images. In #10: A Sunny Day on Bar Beach (2022), a young woman stands before a tv set whose screen bears a ghostly image of a man with a machine gun and a bound captive. Bar Beach in Lagos is where the military executed accused enemies of the dictatorship in Akunyili Crosby’s youth. Thus, an unsettling edge is introduced into this seemingly mellow domestic scene, with its pale-yellow background and ebullient collage of transferred images of African music album covers and hair styles and other images of pop culture that bleed across the furniture and floor. In #11 (2023), Akunyili Crosby adds a different level of tension to an image familiar in her oeuvre, that of herself as a young girl standing in a white dress at her first Catholic communion. But thick salmon-colored lines lie along the left edge of the painting, bisect that edge perpendicularly just below the halfway point of the composition, and then drop down at a 90-degree angle just before the right edge. They form a schematic and flat chair in profile that lies on top of the image. The negative space below it is partially filled with an architectural screen made up of a pattern of octagons. We feel barred off, somehow, from the array of imagery in the background that has come to seem very familiar in her work. There is a distancing, here, in which something perceived as public reads as very private. In a larger sense, it becomes clear that while Akunyili Crosby’s pictures are able to be deconstructed in terms of their source imagery (and Zwirner can provide exceedingly thorough fact sheets that serve as keys to each work), unless one grew up in West Africa, off the Gulf of Guinea, full understanding is difficult to attain. This in no way diminishes the pleasure of the aesthetics on display, in works that knowingly recall the history of Western Art and traditions of history painting, while boldly subverting their codes of reference.

The highlight of the display are three large landscape-format works centered on the three main walls. Still You Bloom in This Land of No Gardens (2021) is a grand self-portrait with her young child on a patio. Blend in – Stand out (2019) is an intimate scene on a large scale of Akunyili Crosby bending over and embracing her husband who is seated at a table that features a Nigerian Igbo vase. The composition is simple, but the forms are monumental, and while neither sitter’s face is visible, the body language conveys a sense of emotional unity as well as, possibly, the physical exhaustion of parents with small children. Finally, Ejuna na-aga, ọ kpụlụ nkọlikọ ya; New Haven (Enugu) in New Haven (CT) of 2022, based on a drawing she made in graduate school at Yale University, represents a rare non-vegetative and depopulated image. A wedding dress hangs in a closet. The title roughly translates to “we move with the things that are precious to us,” and the picture aptly represents the artist’s history as a Nigerian who has decided to stay in the US and raise a family here, but whose connections to the country of her birth remain formidable in her art, in her literary preferences, and in the clothing that she brings from Lagos back to, in this work, New Haven, and now LA. Akunyili Crosby’s work thus collapses time and distance and memory. It feeds off her own history in both elliptical and literal ways. Direct autobiography is not a common thread in contemporary art. But Akunyili Crosby’s winningly earnest yet compellingly layered practice is related to an impulse to rethink traditional history painting by young painters who have been liberated from the two paths of abstraction and conceptual art and have taken to figuration with gusto, productively expanding the genre. Her art eschews sentimentality, as the scenes tend not to be narratival, and mawkish nostalgia, as the technique and compelling color schemes keep them firmly in the present.