Prats Prats Nogueras Blanchard is pleased to present what’s coming 4 them is coming 4 U, the first solo exhibition at the gallery by Chioma Ebinama (New Jersey, 1988). The show explores the spiritual and emotional dimension of the present, in a dialogue between the apocalyptic, the dreamlike and the playful, through a collection of works on paper and a textile sculpture.
Of Nigerian descent and currently based in Athens, Ebinama develops a practice focused on watercolour on paper, also combining drawing, painting, sculpture and textile objects. At the core of her practice, Ebinama understands painting as a form of communication with the world—both visible and unseen—guided by curiosity and an active engagement with the power of stories. For the artist, narrative is not simply a formal resource but a medium capable of reorganising reality and opening up new fields of meaning. Inspired by animism, mythology and pre-colonial African philosophies, combined with elements of religious painting and popular culture, her images operate as poetic collages in which ancient and contemporary stories intertwine: personal mythologies that do not aim to fix an origin but rather activate alternative modes of knowledge. Imagination—or, in her own words, the essential act of play—becomes a way to protect inner life and to sustain a freer relationship to the present, allowing the symbolic, the emotional, and the speculative to unfold without hierarchy.
In what’s coming 4 them is coming 4 U, swans—some with human or doll faces—emerge as hybrid figures, suspended between the sacred and the profane. Inspired by the visions of the Book of Revelations Ebinama reinterprets apocalyptic imagery as a process of revelation and transformation. Her use of watercolour, with its transparency and fragility, evokes an intermediate state between sleep and wakefulness.
The exhibition also includes a new textile sculpture in the form of a stuffed dog —a sagging, soft body that evokes memory and childhood, a defeated body that holds and remembers. This animal, both companion and mirror of the human being, embodies a sense of collective fatigue and a shared need for gentle attention, presence, and comfort. Here, Ebinama explores the need for tenderness, refuge and play; through it, and the figures that inhabit her watercolours, the artist reflects on how we respond to violence and fear in an interconnected world. This openness to the playful and the affective transforms her approach to spirituality: far from dogma, her works invite a form of communion with the world, where the personal and the collective intertwine. Thus, what’s coming 4 them is coming 4 U places the viewer before the possibility of looking beyond oneself. Ebinama’s figures do not herald an end, but rather a call to empathy, attention, and imagination—a proposal for inhabiting the world through creation and care.
