“When life forces you to face yourself, what awaits in the mirror is a gift: vulnerability” - Alicia Keys
There is a profound strength in being seen – not as a fixed image or consumable form, but as a constellation of emotional histories, sensual memories, ancestral echoes, and lived complexities. And yet, there is also a power in withholding, in turning the gaze inward, in choosing opacity over legibility, mystery over performance. To be seen fully, and to sometimes refuse that seeing, is an act of sovereignty.
Her Gaze: A Woman’s Truth emerges from this duality – a curatorial meditation on the multifaceted truths that Black women carry: not just in what they endure, but in how they move through the world with grace, with softness, and with an embodied understanding that beauty can be both balm and assertion.
Timed to coincide with Women’s Month, the exhibition assembles eight artists – Ayobola Kekere-Ekun, REWA, Tonia Nneji, Iyunola Sanyaolu, Sabrina Coleman-Pinheiro, Chidinma Nnoli, and Praise Sanni-Adeniyi – whose work collectively shifts the gaze from dominance to intimacy, from spectacle to interiority. Each practice proposes a different relationship to visibility – some assertive, others elusive; some ornamental, others devotional. What binds them is an insistence that a woman’s truth is not something to be extracted, but something to be honored – often in its quietest, most radiant forms.
Exhibition Dates 20 March 18 - April, 2025
Opening Reception 20 March 2025; 5:00 - 8:00 PM
Location 5-7 Dover St, London W1S 4LD, United Kingdom
Her gaze, as art history has taught us, is rarely neutral. It has long served as a mechanism of control, of objectification, of flattening. But in this exhibition, the gaze is recoded – it becomes a site of care, of layered attention, of mutual witnessing. The women in these works do not pose to be looked at; they appear as if already in communion with something deeper, inviting the viewer not to consume, but to attune.
In this exhibition, painting becomes an act of gentle world-building. It becomes a vessel for nuance, a holding space for unspeakable feelings.
There is no singular image of womanhood here – there are gestures, textures, thresholds. The works lean into a soft sublime, where beauty is not ornamental but existential – woven into the weight of fabric, the curve of a line, the residue of pigment left behind.
Ayobola Kekere-Ekun’s coiled figures speak to the architectures of spirit and kinship. Through intricate paper quilling, she constructs mythic bodies that carry layers of cultural inheritance, maternal lineage, and inner strength. REWA’s poised portraiture, with its bold clarity and ceremonial adornment, asserts a regal calm – her subjects quietly commanding, never pleading to be seen.
Tonia Nneji’s textile-coded figures turn cloth into biography, using commemorative fabrics to speak of bodily autonomy, collective mourning, and sacred resistance.
Iyunola Sanyaolu’s abstracted shadows flicker between memory and forgetting – her works textured with the softness of uncertainty, the blurred lines of recall and loss.
Sabrina Coleman-Pinheiro’s expressive surfaces become emotional maps – her figures neither wholly formed nor entirely vanished, but suspended in moments of grief, rest, and healing.
Chidinma Nnoli’s devotional compositions occupy the liminal space between spirit and body, silence and song. Her muted tones are not absence – they are reverence.
Praise Sanni-Adeniyi’s paintings are meditations on quiet dignity and interior life. Her figures, poised and contemplative, emerge from dreamlike backgrounds; lush with spectral forms and muted flora, inviting stillness and intimacy. With a restrained palette and delicate mark-making, she renders emotional states with reverence, allowing grief, healing, and grace to coexist in soft gestures and subtle gazes. Her work offers a tender architecture for feeling, where presence is not performance, but quiet resilience made visible.
These works do not perform identity. They embody multiplicity. They do not demand to be decoded. They invite slowness, attention, resonance.
In a world where women are so often either invisibilised or overexposed, Her Gaze asks us to consider another possibility: to see with reverence, to look with care, and to honor what remains beautifully unknowable.