Rele Gallery Los Angeles has announced the first solo exhibition of IyunOla Sanyaolu titled “While We Roam”.
Built in layers of thickly-applied paint and sweeping strokes, Sanyaolu creates dream-like, frenzied spaces populated by female forms with barely discernible features and sprawling limbs, said the statement announcing exhibition.
“These figures, shown in stages of visibility offer excavations on lived reality, together with the demands of shifting spaces,” the statement adds. Working primarily in oils, Sanyaolu reflects on existence as unfamiliar and strange, demanding a continuous response of adaptation and movement from its inhabitants.
The exhibition opens at the gallery’s Los Angeles location (8215, Melrose Avenue) at a soon-to-be announced date.
The gallery’s website says Sanyaolu is a graduate of the University of Lagos (UNILAG), where she studied painting and was awarded the female visual artist of the year 2018, from the Department of Creative Arts, of the university.
A 2019/2020 Arts in Medicine (AIM) alumni and a Graduate Art Program (GAP) 2020 cohort by Rand Merchant Bank (RMB), she currently works with the oil medium, where she pushes texture farther than preconceived, a technique known as impasto.
Sanyaolu “creates for self before sharing the energy with whoever comes across her work. She sees her art as self-therapeutic, a believer of the ethos that art has the ability to counter the ill show of life and positively transform ones mindset, underpins the work she creates. With that, she documents what she finds interesting, enjoys experiencing (physical/mental/emotional/spiritual experiences) and also her everyday life observations”.