Always Myself But Never The Same, a solo presentation by Nigerian contemporary artist Ebuka Agudiegwu examines identity as a condition in flux. The exhibition reflects on the impossibility of a singular, stable identity, proposing instead the self as something perpetually becoming, consistent in essence yet continually altered by circumstance, proximity, and experience.

Agudiegwu’s practice has been shaped by a sustained engagement with the interdependence of humans and the natural world, particularly plant life. Historically, this relationship has been rendered through hybridized figures whose bodies dissolve into branches, with hair transforming into foliage and limbs extending as roots. These forms function as visual metaphors for growth, entanglement, and vulnerability. Such botanical interventions operate not merely as symbolic motifs, but as a conceptual framework through which the artist interrogates memory, ecological consciousness, and the porous boundaries between the human and the non-human.

In Always Myself But Never The Same, Agudiegwu deliberately unsettles this established visual language. While traces of botanical forms remain in select works, the exhibition marks a significant departure in which many compositions present fully human figures grounded in everyday gestures and lived realities. This shift does not signal an abandonment of his longstanding concerns, but rather an internalization of them. The plant is no longer always visible on the body; instead, its logic of growth, adaptation, and resilience operates beneath the surface. Identity here is articulated not through overt hybridity, but through posture, colour, spatial tension, and psychological presence.

Rendered in Agudiegwu’s signature use of rich, controlled colour and layered surfaces, the figures in this body of work move through scenes that oscillate between the ordinary and the introspective. Daily life becomes a site of quiet struggle, where social expectation, inherited trauma, and personal desire intersect. The works reflect the perpetual tension between the search for an authentic self and the necessity of adaptation within complex human dynamics, what it means to remain oneself while continuously changing.

Born in Kano, Nigeria in 1997 and currently living and working in Abuja, Agudiegwu early experiences growing up in Ugwu Nchara, Abia State inform his sensitivity to environment and social context. Working primarily with acrylic and oil, alongside charcoal, graphite, ink, pastel, salt, and candle flame soot, he constructs materially layered paintings that mirror the conceptual density of his themes, reinforcing the idea of identity as something shaped over time rather than resolved.

​

VIEW CATALOUGE