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Zidoun‑Bossuyt Gallery is pleased to present Buried Roots Up in the Air, two parallel solo exhibitions, held simultaneously at Zidoun Bossuyt Luxembourg (11 March – 25 April 2026) and Zidoun Bossuyt Paris (19 March – 2 May 2026). The exhibition follows a period of significant international recognition for the artist, who recently completed a residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. In 2025, Oluwaseyi was awarded the prestigious Royal Award for Modern Painting, presented by King Willem‑Alexander of the Netherlands.
With this new body of work, Oluwaseyi uses doorways, windows, external gardens and architecture as means to access the other worlds. Using the everyday life, depicting family and friends within domestic interiors that are at once familiar, remembered, but yet reimagined. Drawing from personal archives, he reflects on the interplay between memory and lived experience, exploring how identity is shaped through both personal and collective histories. As a Nigerian artist now living in the Netherlands, he approaches domestic life with an instinctive desire to document, using nostalgia as a means to evoke memory and belonging. His compositions draw inspiration from mid-20th-century studio photography, balancing formality and intimacy while subtly referencing the broader social and political contexts that shape African lives on the continent and throughout the diaspora.
In Buried Roots Up in the Air, domestic interiors become emotional vessels, revealing how intimate spaces carry the weight of heritage, identity, and belonging. Rather than enclosing the viewer, the paintings open outward, offering the sensation of stepping into a moment already unfolding. By layering past and present interiors, these paintings create a tension between depth and surface that spatially and narratively affect how the viewer moves through the composition. Oluwaseyi’s practice centers on figuration, bridging the gap between figuration and expressionism to examine identity and its influences within shared environments. His paintings are built on layered figurative compositions that combine painted depictions of people (friends and family) from his personal archive, places, and subjects drawn from Nigerian magazines and mass-media sources.
These paintings become visual tapestries that bring to life the personal and social dimensions of contemporary experience which reflect the complexities of African and diasporic identity. He works with figuration not as a form of likeness alone, but as a medium where the socio-political and cultural are explored. Investigating the social transformations affecting his community, Oluwaseyi employs different painting languages with traditional portraiture and through the practice of classical painterly strategies developed a distinctive presence-absence dialectic that defines his style. Working primarily in oil, he builds textured layers that gradually reveal sculptural and luminous tableaux.
BIOGRAPHY
INSTALLATION VIEWS
