NEW YORK, NY.- Odili Donald Odita is a comprehensive monograph which spans thirty years of his artistic practice - from his early mixed media collages - to his current painting installations, and more.
Odili’s vibrant abstract paintings blur the borderlines of American, African, and Western European traditions, which according to Rob Storr, has led him to “rejuvenate abstract painting 100 years after its invention – and in the process create a culturally syncretic idiom that is all his own.”
The book’s discreet black and white cover betrays a striking panoply of colors, papers, and formats that make up the book’s 400+ pages. Mixing and layering drawings, geometric studies, paintings, installations, and texts creates momentary connections between different images - echoing Odita’s thirty year artistic pursuit of fusing disparate and separate colors into spiritually unified spaces.
Inspired both by African and American Design, the book mixes his paintings, drawings, and installations with a trove of materials from the Black Album, a collection of ads, photographs, and media clippings related to race and Black American culture that he has been collecting for years. This intermixing contextualizes Odita’s abstract expressionism within a political context of struggle, race, and diaspora, resulting in a timely meditation on race in America.
Born in Nigeria, and raised in the United States, Odili describes an early interest in finding ways to simultaneously embrace all of his identities, a pursuit that has led to an ever evolving painting practice. The black silkscreen on the cloth covered board picks up on the photocopied black paper, which runs throughout the book. Odita used these sheets in early installations (an element from the Black Album), and pairing these archival images with his own works emphasizes the lack of hierarchy within the flat-color forms, and the political symbolism of the vanishing points found within his painting, which point outside of the four corners of western metaphysics. His work continually both problematizes and builds upon the principles of abstraction, echoed further by his recent use of wood veneer in lieu of white linen.
The curatorial essays were laid out on spreads from Ebony Magazine, and while the images and captions were preserved, the original texts were erased and replaced with new ones, with Odili’s work appearing on smaller shiny papers reminiscent of the detachable mail in subscription advertisements in magazines from the 80’s and 90’s.
Texts by Stamatina Gregory, Gregory Volk, and Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, and a conversation between Odili and Ian Sternthal.
The book accompanies Odili’s current exhibition Burning Cross, currently on view at the Jack Shainman Gallery in NYC.
