Following the success of her solo exhibition chi; Altarpieces, Liturgy & Devotion at York Art Gallery, Ed Cross is delighted to announce representation of Nigerian-born British artist Ugonna Hosten. Transforming inherently incommunicable experiences – dreams and visions, feelings and frisson – into something legible, Hosten’s work translates interior to exterior.
Drawing on her Igbo spiritual heritage with singular creative focus, Hosten pulls mystical experiences into the 2-dimensional plane of her drawings. The accuracy of her draughtsmanship sits in delicious opposition to the esotericism of her subject matter, rendering impossible totems and blurred bodies with the precision of an anatomical drawing or a photograph. Everything is depicted with an exactitude that communicates both urgency and clarity – reporting from the other side, as it were.
The dreaminess of Hosten’s compositions is no coincidence. Whether they are surreal snapshots or elaborate narratives, imbued with the unconscious’ unerring antilogic, Hosten often uses her own dreams as inspiration for her works. A pair of drawings, each orbiting one of her parents, embody her practice’s essential duality: dripping with symbolism while resisting straightforward interpretation, both suggest dream-reality as a physical place; in the artist’s words, the unconscious as a realm in its own right.
In My father's decree – The way up is the way back, Hosten’s protagonist is set halfway up (or maybe down) a flight of stairs. At the top, a gigantic serpent waits, its head raised – has it seen the figure? Is she walking towards it or backing away? Below, a goat considers its passage through a door cut into the stairway – meanwhile, in the drawing’s bottom right corner, a man at a table holds court.
Though he is alone, his hands and face are animated as though in dialogue – is this the titular father, delivering his decree? Like the hyper-real wood grain on the floorboards in front of him, the intricate pattern on his clothes imbues the surreal scene with a confounding realness. A chair opposite is empty, waiting – implicitly, the girl on the stairs (or the viewer herself) is invited to take up their half of his ersatz conversation.
My mother's decree – See the tail of the kite is similarly ambiguous, both comprehensible and hovering just beyond the bounds of interpretation. Intuitive symbols – like the mother figure’s outstretched arm, sending her daughter in the direction she’s pointing – are impossible to misread; additions such as an inert horse (dead, or sleeping?) to the composition’s bottom left, seem altogether less scrutable. Where do these images come from? To the artist, the answers are clear if not simple.
Splicing together different events and locations, Hosten’s compositions assert their own oneiric logic while leaving ample room for her viewer’s narrative. Faced with snapshots, we cannot help but fill in the blanks – and while our accounts will differ, it is what they have in common that underpins Hosten’s wider project.
For all their inestimably personal resonances, Hosten’s compositions retain a universalising magic – as representation gives way to pure symbolism, a mother is a mother, a journey is a journey, a dream is a dream, and their depictions remain curiously accessible rather than alienating. If Hosten figures myth as a genre of reality, then her work is the territory where the two fuse. Here, meaning overlays meaning, enriching rather than muddying a given message and opening new vistas altogether.
Drawing on ancient traditions of storytelling and divinity that exist independently of her practice, Hosten’s work of ‘creating’ might just as well be described as ‘finding’. Panning her own unconscious (as well as her understanding of a collective one, brimming with tropes and stories that recur over time and space), the artist produces work that – counterintuitively – pertains to us all.
Director Ed Cross: “I’m proud to be working with Ugonna Hosten to bring her extraordinary work to the attention of the contemporary African and wider art world. I was immediately struck by her seriousness and humility and at the same time the innate ambition of her practice both in terms of the historically and culturally precious subject matter and her self-realised technical excellence.”
