On view at Sprüth Magers is Senga Nengudi’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in over 40 years, featuring the US premiere of 2 large-scale installations, Bulemia (1988/2018) and Sandmining B (2020).
Always deeply connected to the body—whether formally, metaphorically or through careful spatial choreography—Nengudi’s works invoke ritual, narrative and connections between cultures disparate in geography and time. Nengudi’s interweaving of sculpture and performance is omnipresent in her work, including in the monumental installation Bulemia (1988/2018)—her own version of a ‘utopian place’—where news items relating to African Americans and Black subjects around the world take centre stage. The artist’s foregrounding of Black narratives highlights positive elements rather than negative ones, altogether pointing to a potential future in which the breadth and vitality of African American life is attended to and celebrated. The works in the exhibition are at once approachable in their modest materials, visually arresting in their form and content and politically incisive.
