Opening on September 18th in the presence of the artist
MAGNIN-A gallery is pleased to present So Pretty, the first solo exhibition in France by Wura-Natasha Ogunji. Bringing together around thirty works created between 2017 and 2024, the exhibition offers an immersion into the graphic and deeply sensitive world of the Nigerian-American artist.
It features her emblematic ink-drawn tracing paper works—sometimes cut, often embroidered with thread—a unique visual language where the movements of bodies and ideas unfold in a choreography of lines and vibrant colors. Her most recent pieces signal a formal shift: the surfaces grow denser, the compositions more saturated, generating a new tension that contrasts with the lightness and luminosity of earlier works. The artist embraces new materials—magazine pages, glassine paper, gesso, laterite—which she treats with deliberate freedom. She subverts their traditional uses, layering ink and oil paint, sometimes on both sides of a single sheet, revealing an attentiveness to accident, wandering, and the unexpected. Delicately stitched faces give way to masked figures, fractured heads, and haunting apparitions, oscillating between magic and uncanny strangeness. The palette darkens, landscapes become obscured, and the cutouts grow sharper.
The exhibition’s title, So Pretty, functions as a trompe-l’œil. Beneath this surface sweetness lies a sharp reflection on the construction of aesthetic norms and the symbolic violence they can conceal. Beneath the formal elegance, the works reveal underlying tensions: suspended forms, scars, buried memories. Between delicacy and expressive power, the exhibition maps emotions that are as intimate as they are universal. It is a visceral journey through the human experience—one that celebrates imperfection as much as the act of creation itself, in all its intuitive, erratic, and deeply alive nature.
