Welcoming Uman to Hauser & Wirth in Partnership with Nicola Vassell Gallery

About the Artist
Uman was born in Somalia in 1980. She moved with her family to Kenya in 1989 as a result of the Somali Civil War, before relocating to Denmark at the age of 13. From an early age, Uman loved to draw and was fascinated by color and illustration. In the 2000s, while in her 20s, Uman moved to New York NY. There, she met Swiss-born, Manhattan-based psychiatrist Annatina Miescher, who encouraged the artist’s intuitive approach to painting and served as a mentor.  

In 2015, Uman’s first solo exhibition opened at White Columns in New York NY, attracting significant attention for paintings, sculptures and assemblage works that dazzled with their unorthodox and wholly original approach to layering cross-cultural, art historical and textile-based references. As poet and critic Ilka Scobie explained, ‘[Uman] embodies a fluidity that transcends borders, genders, abstraction and figuration.’ 

Uman’s work synthesizes the various cultures in which she has lived, with her experiences finding their way into recurring motifs: animals of the East African desert, patterns evoking Somalian hand-woven fabrics, Nordic environments from her time in Denmark, the urban landscape of Manhattan and the starry skies in upstate New York. Since 2020, Uman has divided her time between Albany NY and the rural community of Roseboom NY, places that together form the center of her life and work. The natural world continues to directly inform her art through the physical and psychological shifts of the landscape, contributing to her fictional topographies. 

The element of self-portraiture permeates Uman’s practice. As she says, ‘I think everything I do now is a self-portrait in different ways. Even my abstract paintings, mythical in nature, are self-portraits. I love drama, and so I depict myself with several mouths, and several eyes, just like a creature.’ This kind of autobiographical transfiguration is seen in works such as ‘Grand Dame Uman’ (2022) and ‘Hell in Heels’ (2022). ‘Amapiano Dance’ (2022 – 2023) is a visual evocation of a well-known genre of South African dance music beloved of the artist—an indirect portrait of the sources of inspiration that give shape to her life and imagination.  

Uman privileges saturated colors, combining bright jewel tones alongside darker hues in surprising ways. Her mastery of pigments makes possible a trajectory between past and present. ‘They come from my past,’ she explains. ‘I grew up with colorful women, a colorful culture. East African and Somali people love color more than anything. I’ve kept that in me, living here in the West, and I’m using that in my work to tell a story’. The artist’s process begins with the repeated layering of these colors, followed by a removal of paint via minimal but resolute gestures. This approach heightens the materiality of Uman’s works. ‘I find beauty in the canvas itself,’ she has said about the practice of leaving some of her canvases unprimed. ‘It’s a beautiful strong material that sometimes needs to participate in the painting.’  

In addition to prolific iconography from her own memories and dreams, Uman uses geometric forms, dots and abstract patterning that resembles mycelial networks. These collide with anthropomorphic elements to culminate in depictions that are at once botanical and intergalactic. The recent painting ‘Samone’ (2023) features a grid of intricately patterned abstractions interspersed with triangulations that are each embellished with a singular all-seeing eye. These exuberant, seemingly freestyle markings recall the Arabic calligraphy Uman studied as a child: ‘When I see how I draw, or scribble or doodle—it always has a slant, like Islamic calligraphy.’ The resulting marks coalesce into Uman’s own highly distinctive language of symbols.    

Uman has had solo exhibitions at Nicola Vassell, New York NY; Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens, Greece; Fierman, New York NY; Anne De Villepoix, Paris, France; and White Columns, New York NY. She has been featured in group exhibitions at the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, Canada; For-Site Foundation at Fort Mason Chapel, San Francisco CA; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK; Karma, New York NY; and Ramiken Crucible, New York NY. In 2022, she was the recipient of the inaugural grant for The Cube at TRIADIC’s FORMAT Festival in Bentonville AR.