For more than five decades, Senga Nengudi has developed a distinctive practice that moves across sculpture, performance, dance, and language, connecting humble everyday materials with philosophical and spiritual ideas. Her works are at once abstract, anthropomorphic, and vibrant. Pointing to social and political conditions without ever becoming illustrative, they instead insist on the spontaneous and existential encounter between artwork and viewer, grounded in a profound belief in the potential of every human being.
Senga Nengudi is a central figure in recent American art history. In recent years, her works have been the focus of several major exhibitions across Europe and South America. Sand and Water is Senga Nengudi’s first solo exhibition in Denmark and the Nordic region and has been developed in close collaboration with the artist.
At the centre of the exhibition is a new site-specific installation conceived especially for Den Frie’s lower-level gallery OSLO, composed of sand, metal, glass, rubber, textiles, pigment, sound, and found objects. The work appears as an abstract, fragmented landscape and at the same time as a pulsating visual field. The combination of elements from very different contexts and with different tactile qualities is thematically connected to memory, loss, industry, craft, labour, and nature. As a whole, the installation evokes a sense of a world coming to an end, while at the same time suggesting a world in the process of being born anew.
Also included in the exhibition is a series of sculptures made of pigmented water, temporarily enclosed within transparent plastic volumes. Originating in the 1970s, these Water Compositionsmust be recreated each time they are exhibited due to their temporary nature. They balance precariously between interior and exterior, the fluid and the fixed, the playful and the unsettling. Although composed of recognisable materials, they appear as strangely alien, posthuman bodies or beings — at once organic, vulnerable, and unfamiliar. They are balanced precariously between interior and exterior, the fluid and the fixed. Despite their grounding in everyday materials, they also seem like posthuman bodies or strange beings, in which the artificial and the organic are inextricably fused together.
Senga Nengudi (b. 1943, Chicago) lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Her recent solo exhibitions include Dia: Beacon, Beacon, NY (2023-26), Philadelphia Museum of Art (2021), Denver Art Museum (2020), Museo de Arte de São Paulo (2020), Lenbachhaus, Munich (2019), Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2018), Baltimore Museum of Art (2018), and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2017). In a Scandinavian context, Senga Nengudi participated in the performance program Incandescent as part of the exhibition Now-Here at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (1996). Her works are represented in public collections worldwide.
