Herald St

Sanou Oumar

Herald St | 2 Herald St, E2 6JT

19th November 2021 - 18th February 2022

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Herald St is pleased to present the gallery’s second solo exhibition with Sanou Oumar, taking place in its East London premises. The installation features over twenty vibrant works on paper in two scales: one intimate and familiar, and the other expansive and immersive. Grouped by size and hung in one continuous line around the gallery, the exhibition evinces the artist’s daily, repetitive practice of meditative drawing, layered with memories and loaded with visual potency.

Growing up in Burkina Faso, Oumar had little exposure to art. He found aesthetic pleasure instead in the orderliness of the everyday: clean dishes, crisply folded sheets, buildings with neatly aligned windows, a brochure of Paris displaying the architectural beauty of the Eiffel Tower. His work has previously been considered alongside the early twentieth-century pioneering abstractionists Emma Kunz and Hilma af Klint, whose cosmic paintings were long deemed to be on the fringes of the Western canon. While there are marked similarities on a formal and mystical level, Oumar explains that his drawings are simply about ‘someone who is sitting quietly and thinking about themselves’. He began drawing shortly after moving to New York as an asylum seeker in 2015, while waiting for his lawyer at the refugee centre in Harlem or after meetings in Morningside Park. Over time his practice became a ritual, a nightly accomplishment marking a moment of deep reflection.

Oumar starts each drawing by contemplating his tabula rasa, the white sheet of paper. Using a compass, he anchors his work by tracing a perfect circle in pencil, and chooses his first colour based on the chance element of whichever is closest to hand. He made his earliest drawings in black and white, mimicking the precision of a computer-generated image. Yet, he invites sleights of hand within his practice, embracing flecks of ink and pencil smudges as proof of a human presence. When asked how his work has evolved in the past year, the artist’s answer is to the point: ‘Each drawing says the same story about Sanou.’ The rigorous mark-making and sophisticated palette is intuitive, less concerned with formal and chromatic experimentation and more closely tied to personal experiences: memories of his childhood and his mother, the architecture which surrounds him, and life events which unfold in his mind.