Odili Donald Odita

Odili Donald Odita (b. 1966, Enugu, Nigeria) brings heightened awareness to color and space in paintings where abstraction is an optically, physically, and culturally-felt phenomenon. Though they are rooted in a broad range of historical lineages—Africanist approaches to pattern; modernist painting and design; and contemporary conceptual positions, to name a few—his compositions make immediate appeals to the senses in the here and now. Odita's take on non-objective art is suffused with connectivity to the world around him, and arises from memories, philosophical reflections, and meditations on the ways in which political forces shape relationships between perception and form. His primary stance is one of constant engagement, as evidenced by Odita's interest in creating both discrete works and large-scale, site-specific installations. In both cases, he decenters figure-ground relationships to generate palpable experiences of the horizon and the periphery. These, in turn, become metaphorical carriers of possibility and surprise, as well as symbols of openness in the visual and social worlds alike.