Kayode Ojo

Posing, presentation and construction are cornerstones of Kayode Ojo’s artistic practice, who was born in 1990, Cookeville, USA. Many of the materials employed over and over again in his works are cheap: fast fashion, fake luxury brands jewellery, faux-fur coats, metal music stands, copies of modernist furniture, mirrors, or polished ornaments. Ojo’s artistic universe plays with the rules of representation, he focuses with these items on the values they give to a subject and the lifestyle they project. But maybe, he is applying a kind of glossy reflection as a strategy to distort identitarian imagery, which by extension, can be understood as a distorted reflection of our time. Or not! Emerging originally out of photography, some of his pictures are like party photos à la Nan Goldin. And like his sculptures, they are filled with signifiers of certain types of success.

Kayode Ojo received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 2012. Ojo has had solo presentations at galleries worldwide, most recently at Von Ammon Co., Washington, DC (2023); Università Iuav di Venezia, Venice (2022); Sweetwater, Berlin (2021); Martos Gallery, New York (2020); Praz-Delavallade, Los Angeles (2020); Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris (2018); and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2018).