This is Close Looks: a semi-regular column from CULTURED Co-Chief Art Critics Johanna Fateman and John Vincler. This series of long-form pieces dives into both buzzy and under-the-radar shows alike, revealing the trends, ideas, and controversies that shape what’s happening—and what’s to come—in the art world.
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco The Last Judgment came immediately to mind when looking at Nengi Omuku’s I Can’t Feel My Legs 2, 2024, in her stand-out New York solo debut exhibition, “Wild Things and Perennials,” at Kasmin Gallery. While the scale isn’t a match, there is great painterly ambition in the Nigerian-born artist’s work, as well as an attempt to render this world and a world beyond—a realm of afterlife and ancestors.
Omuku, who now lives between Lagos and London, captures, in this particular scene, bodies sitting or lying supine, as if they are recovering from a traumatic event—like an earthquake or a bombing—arrayed within a pale blue sky, with moody clouds in hues ranging from lavender to orange. In the bottom-left of the composition, someone (a child?) seems to beckon, with open arms, to the other figures, breaking the stillness of a stunned moment.
