Condo London 2026Phillida Reid
January 17 - February 14, 2026
“For Condo 2026, we are pleased to present Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju’s work alongside work by Richard Walker, presented by CORPUS, Cambridge, and Roberto Gil de Montes, presented by kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York.
Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju is a Nigerian-American artist and writer based in Berlin. Her work asks how materials hold desire, identity, and inherited narratives, and how meaning and material shift, contort, scar and change shape under one another’s influence. Her materials become both surfaces and vessels for her compositions, charged with autobiographical and geopolitical resonances: stretched cowhide evocative of skins and membranes, ancestral memories, violence, sensuality and luxury; curling leafs of birch bark and lopped birch stumps suggestive of the cultural history of the birch tree as a symbol of innocence, purity, whiteness and fertility, its symbolic legibility interrupted by pyrographic inscriptions; breeze blocks in the style of those used by her grandfather to build his home.
Ilupeju’s compositions draw from found, appropriated and deeply personal imagery. The artist’s own body is depicted in fragmented, tender close-up, like a fallen tree: the body becomes a conjoined, disjointed landscape, mottled by the bark’s texture. Paintings on leather reflect on rituals of marriage and weddings: unions where tenderness and transaction coexist.”
Image Credit: Lewis Ronald