The Nigerian artist inaugurates Zwirner’s new Los Angeles gallery with paintings that showcase her artistic vernacular.
LOS ANGELES — To listen to Njideka Akunyili Crosby talk about the lengths to which she’ll go in researching the scientific classification of plants to depict in one of her paintings — Madagascar Jasmine? Safari Sunset? — is to begin to understand this Nigerian artist’s slow and exacting approach, as well as why her new exhibition, inaugurating David Zwirner’s first Los Angeles gallery on May 23, feels like a significant art world event. “I had a clear idea of what I wanted the plant to do,” said Akunyili Crosby, 40, in a recent conversation at her East Los Angeles studio, discussing the process behind the self-portrait, “Still You Bloom in This Land of No Gardens,” which features her in patterned pants, holding her youngest child on the porch surrounded by lush greenery. “There was a certain amount of obscuring that had to happen — you can’t obscure the pants so much that you’re just seeing little pieces of it,” she continued. “Some plants are very dense — you had to see enough of the pants to make sense of it. But the plants also couldn’t be so thin that it just didn’t work.” She spent hours looking through pictures of flora and fauna from Nigeria and L.A., spending time in a plant store and visiting the Huntington art museum’s expansive botanical gardens, where she walked around all day “looking for a very particular leaf.” “Normally I would have said, it takes me about three months to do a work, but it’s slowly been extending into longer,” she said. “I’ve slowed down to get what I need.”
No wonder, then, that Akunyili Crosby welcomed the additional time to keep working while the gallery’s construction was delayed by excessive rain and bureaucratic hurdles. Zwirner himself said Crosby’s work in the exhibition — “Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Coming Back to See Through, Again” — which includes new and recent paintings in the East Hollywood space designed by Selldorf Architects, was well worth waiting for. “She’s been able to create a new vernacular and a new iconography in contemporary visual culture,” he said. “She brought to the art world her own language.”