Wunika Mukan Gallery is pleased to present Young, Fresh N' New, a group exhibition bringing together nine emerging artists whose practices span painting, photography. textiles, and mixed media. Opening on Saturday. May 9, 2026, the exhibition gathers artists from Nigeria and the diaspora whose works reflect a generation deeply engaged in redefining contemporary visual language through introspection, experimentation, and material sensitivity.

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At the heart of the exhibition is intimism, a practice of turning inward to domestic spaces. private moments, and the quiet emotional textures of daily life. The works gathered here refuse spectacle in favor of sustained attention to what is often overlooked. Muted palettes capture fleeting moments in Nigerian environments and domestic interiors, where the architecture of everyday life becomes a stage for contemplation. Naked figures are rendered not for external consumption but as vessels of psychological truth, revealing the paradoxes of intimacy. Painterly photography reimagines classical allegories of beauty. while bold, unrefined brushwork centers the ordinary confidence of Black youth, reframing who gets to look and who gets to be seen.

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Working across disciplines, the artists expand the language of image-making in distinct yet interconnected ways. Traci Johnson constructs tactile textile environments that reimagine religious and architectural spaces as sites of queer healing. intimacy, and protection. Lasisi Kehinde Charles, through bold colour fields and assertive figuration, captures the quiet confidence of Black youth, positioning his subjects not as observed figures but as self-possessed authorities within their own visual space.

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Daniel Oruwhone's practice engages the nude body as an archive of emotional and psychological states, drawing from classical traditions while unsettling their assumptions through vulnerability and fragmentation. Opoku Eric Asare works through archival photographic transfers layered onto sculptural surfaces, tracing the ecological and social consequences of environmental degradation in Ghanaian mining regions, while simultaneously interrogating the circulation and construction of images.

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Kamzy Nuel's painterly photographic compositions rework classical allegories-most notably the Three Graces-into contemporary reflections on beauty, identity, and perception, collapsing temporal boundaries between past and present. Tomisin Egbonwon's work draws from cultural artefacts and architectural forms, positioning objects such as talking drums and calabashes as "objects of nature," grounding her practice in material histories and acts of cultural reclamation.

Chidube Emmanuel's paintings dwell in the quiet weight of everyday life. Working from observation, memory, and photography, he constructs intimate scenes like schoolyards. domestic interiors, and familiar urban environments, where gesture and stillness carry emotional charge.

Ifeoluwase Taiwo (Wase Taiwo) operates within a monochrome, surreal visual language that collapses memory, emotion, and symbolism into tightly constructed psychological spaces.
Working primarily in black and white, he strips away excess to focus on tension-between what is revealed and what remains obscured.

Suchet Baba moves between writing and painting, constructing an interdisciplinary practice grounded in storytelling as a means of shifting perception. Her paintings, guided by intuition and material exploration, translate interior states into vivid, immersive compositions that sit between the mystical and the spiritual.

Across other practices in the exhibition, questions of selfhood, memory, community, and becoming unfold through diverse formal approaches, ranging from intimate painterly scenes of everyday life to surreal and symbolic explorations of interior worlds. Whether through the construction of sanctuary, the documentation of lived experience, or the reimagining of inherited forms, each artist contributes to a broader conversation about presence, visibility, and self-definition.

Young. Fresh N' New is not a survey of emerging talent, but a constellation of practices in formation. It resists the impulse toward resolution, instead embracing process, uncertainty. and evolution. In a cultural moment that often demands clarity and completion, the exhibition insists on the value of becoming, on the necessity of remaining open. questioning, and in flux.