I Love You After Everything

Nicola Vassell is pleased to present I Love You After Everything, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Uman, the artist's second solo presentation with the gallery. The exhibition traces Uman's rhapsodic abstraction through the instrument of geometry, with works that unfold according to the unorthodoxy of imagination and the formal logic of the grid. These contrary forces produce a mutation of form where properties of lines, points and surfaces that were once inspired by the rolling hills, silence and mud of countryside life are replaced with the repetition and rhythm of city buildings, windows and streetlights. Coinciding with Uman: After all the things… —the artist's first solo institutional exhibition currently on view at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum—and preceding an upcoming survey exhibition at the Hessel Museum of Art in summer 2026, I Love You After Everything is a vivid manifestation of Uman's continuous process of scrutiny and synthesis. Uman's practice is deeply informed by the geographic sprawl of her life: childhood in Somalia and Kenya, adolescence in Denmark, early adult life in New York City and current residence in upstate New York, all of which has resulted in the formation of an expansive lexicon of symbols and forms, a vast trove of knowledge and wisdom that she draws upon during the creative process. These myriad experiences and influences have been expressed and transfigured through her unique approach to abstraction, one which embraces the grid as a site of "many paintings living inside one frame, each square possessing its own breath." Though she uses the grid first as a way of constructing painterly space, Uman eventually explores it as a language unto itself—one capable of polarity where compositions hold and divide, exert looseness and discipline, revel in chaos and order. A suite of four paintings—each titled after the grid—combine radiant, jewel-like colors with armatures that move between pattern and spontaneity, presenting singular visions that combine the terrestrial and the otherworldly, the personal and the mystical. In other paintings the grid is a more deconstructed form. Stitch and gesture propel diagonally or in waves across the picture plane, appearing as metaphoric mesh within an overall composition. Rather than deploy the grid as a totalizing schema—one that reduces image and idea to a mere formula—Uman instead wields it as an essential tool for interpreting the world while at the same time understanding its provisional nature, as something to be used much more than adhered to. In a diptych where door frames are evoked as being the containers for her splintered, kaleidoscopic geometries, Uman reminds us that these are, ultimately, portals and passageways to new realities. "Love arrives softly, in stillness, in presence, It lingers in small gestures in the spaces between color and form, in the quiet persistence of being I have everything now The enduring pulse of feeling, love after everything" —Uman Uman (b. 1980, Somalia) is a multimedia artist who lives and works in upstate New York. She creates lavishly detailed microcosms replete with color, gesture, geometry and evocations of the natural world. Reflecting her experiences growing up across continents and cultures, her vibrant visual vocabulary draws upon memories of East African childhood, rigorous education in traditional Arabic calligraphy, deep engagement with dreams and fascination with kaleidoscopic color. With nods to self-portraiture and fictional topographies, Uman's works fluidly inhabit a liminal space between abstraction, figuration and meditative patterning. Solo exhibitions include I Love You After Everything, Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York (2025); Uman: After all the things..., The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut (2025); Uman: A Fantastic Woman, Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, Switzerland (2025); Darling sweetie, sweetie darling, Hauser and Wirth, London (2024); Uman: I want everything now, Nicola Vassell, New York (2023); Goodnight, sweetdreams, Eleni Koroneou, Athens (2022); I hope this finds you well, Fierman, New York (2021); I will sit here and wait for you, Fierman, New York (2019) and Uman, White Columns, New York (2015). Group exhibitions include Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection, Kemper Art Museum, Missouri (2025); 12TH Site Santa Fe International, Curated by Cecilia Alemani, New Mexico (2025); The Abstract Future, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2025); The Selves, Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York (2024); Supra Nature, Anne De Villepoix, Paris, France (2023); Sanctuary, Aga Khan Museum, Toronto (2020) and A house to die in, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2012). Nicola Vassell is a contemporary art gallery committed to discourse that widens the lens of the history and future of art. Its focus is on developing an intergenerational, cross-disciplinary program of international artists and thinkers.

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