Tangible and Intangible

Artist Statement

Goosebumps series:

Through a variety of mediums, Osi Audu creates shapes, patterns, and textures that reveal facets of human consciousness. His Goosebumps series (2023) focuses on piloerection (also known as the pilomotor reflex or horripilation), which is the involuntary reaction to strong emotions or experiences that results in raised body hair. Inspired by how yarn is incorporated into many cultural techniques throughout Africa, Audu weaves thick stripes of brightly colored yarn through canvas so that it protrudes and takes on a visceral charge. In doing so, his compositions are designed to trigger “aesthetic chills” while contemplating what he refers to as “the skin of things.” 

— Sophie Landres, Curator of the Dorsky Musem of Art.

Self Portrait Series

“Though on flat surface, [Audu’s] work appears three-dimensional. Solid black forms dominate the center of the picture plane. With voluminous architectural shapes composed of different parts but bound seamlessly by slick white lines in the new Self-Portrait series, Audu stretches the boundaries of abstraction, teasing the imagination. Using a variety of mediums, including acrylic, graphite, pastel and yarn on canvas or paper, he examines scientific, philosophical and cultural concepts surrounding the relationship between mind and body. His compositions are often inspired by the abstract geometric possibilities he sees in African art and cultural objects.”

— Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Curator of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA, New York.

My drawings, described in The Village Voice, by the art critic - R.C. Baker as, "shape-shifting..., space-warping geometric abstractions", are about blackness - not as an absence of light, but as light that is not perceivable by the eyes. Thus my work speaks to all that is unseeable and unknowable about the nature of being.

Issue of Self Identity. My work investigates the issue of self identity. The construction of a sense of self is a very complex process, perhaps even more so as the world gets less exotic and is being experienced more as a sphere of commonalities, where boundaries between race, nationality, gender and sexuality are increasingly blurred.  The title Self-Portrait  in my work refers to the intangible self, which is our common inheritance, rather than a literal portrait of the artist.

Masked Head series (yarn and pastel on paper, mounted on canvas) Inspired by the Egungun masquerade tradition in Nigeria, my Masked Head series is a metaphor for the mystery about the nature of human consciousness and the self. Monochrome colors used in each work are symbolic expressions of states of being. I am fascinated by the way facial coverings, whilst concealing the identity of the wearer, simultaneously reveal something of the unconscious.

My sculptures are inspired by my use of black and white plus a single color as used in my Masked Head series. With these spay-painted steel sculptures I examine the dualism of the tangible and intangible, the philosophical and cultural concepts of the self in relation to the mind/body experience.