Marais, Paris
Olu Ogunnaike
An Enclosed Garden
GB AgencyOlu Ogunnaike’s experimental art practice lies between sculpture, printmaking, performance and installation. Fascinated with daily rituals and events that inform our sense of individual and collective awareness, wood and the products made from it are central to his practice. Taking trees as repositories of memory within the places and communities in which they grow, Ogunnaike cites wood as a marker of possible encounters: between past and present; between people and the spaces they inhabit. For An Enclosed Garden, his first solo at gb agency, surplus library books act as a departure point representing the layers of untold stories from contemporary societies. Ogunnaike will explore parallels between the weeds that grow through the pavements of Parisian streets, to the overflowing archives the excess books came from. With themes of hortus conclusus (enclosed garden) anchoring his recent thinking, Olu plans to create a rebellious garden inside the gallery; where the transformed books speak to the unwanted foliage of a city. Olu Ogunnaike, born 1986, lives and works in London, UK. Selected solo exhibitions include, I’d rather stand, Museum Folkwang, Essen, DE; Crumbs, CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, FR; The Same Way You Came In?, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK (2021); London Plain, Cell Project Space, London, UK (2020); Nutrition for the Next, Jupiter Woods, London, UK (2018). Selected group exhibitions are as follows, Villa Arson, Nice, FR (upcoming in 2023); Testament, Goldsmiths CCA, London, UK (2022); Domestic Drama, Halle für Kunst Steiermark, Graz, AT (2021); Nesting; Sunken Ecologies, Margate Now21, Sunken Gardens, Kent, UK; Performing Objects, Hua International, Beijing, CN; The Feuilleton: I will bear witness:Piggy-backing-from the Edicola, Spoleto and Macro Rome, IT; Governmental Fires, Futura, Prague, CZ (all in 2021); Memory Game, Villa Lontana, Rome, IT (2020)