Michael Stevenson

Odili Donald Odita
A Third Power

2006
Acrylic on canvas
213 x 277cm

Odili Donald Odita, who will have his first solo show at Michael Stevenson in June/July 2008, exhibited enormous wall paintings at this year’s 52nd Venice Biennale. He inaugurated the new Project Room at the Studio Museum in Harlem with a wall painting titled Equalizer (on display until April 2008), and has just completed an expansive wall work, Flow, for the new Zaha Hadid-designed Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, on view for the next year.

Odita’s commission for a building designed by Hadid is an inspired pairing. Given their different mediums, they share an aesthetic of fractured and intersecting hardedged planes that are optically and spatially disruptive. Odita was born in Nigeria, but even though there are references in his distinctive aesthetic to Nigerian patterns and designs, he strongly resists classification in terms of this tradition. He cites the television test pattern, screensavers, wallpaper and landscapes as well as North American modernism as points of departure for his imagery. In addition, he does not direct interpretation through his titles. In his mind, the different associations that his rhythmic and vivid abstracts personally evoke are all valid and legitimate. However, analogies to music and sound are often noted in critiques of his work. For example, Olu Oguibe relates his paintings to modal jazz, yet reminds us of the contentions that are latent in Odita’s aesthetic:

In the same manner that modal jazz aspires toward pure sound, Odita’s paintings achieve a significant level of visual and chromatic purity that lends them vibrancy and spaciousness. His use of space is lean, deep and resonant. Even so, in the same way that modal jazz refined social protest into spare but inimitably infectious sound, with Coltrane’s notes imbued with the eloquent sound of activism, Odita’s elements are in fact loaded with social questions and implications as well as challenges for abstraction as a language: How does abstraction deal with the reality of race in the post-millennial age, for instance? How does pigment speak to our obvious diversity and the beauty of that diversity, as well as the insidious machinations of exoticism and stereotypy? How do social striations translate on canvas? (‘Artists on Artists’, BOMB Magazine, 89, Fall 2004)

Odita lives in Philadelphia where he is an Associate Professor of Painting at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University.