"Sometimes I start from a figure and it mutates into something else, into an abstract composition. I just go by my instincts. If I feel like adding a face or an eye or hands, I go with that." - Uman with Chris Martin, The Brooklyn Rail, 2023.
Uman’s self-taught practice is not miraculous, but a rare fusion of instinct and discipline. Her gut sensibilities are rooted in the ritual of painting every day, teaching herself to generate both incrementally and monumentally. She feels that, “When I am painting, I know exactly what I am doing,” a declaration of confidence in a lifelong effort dedicated to developing her style and voice. Uman is committed to the limitless realms of her mind’s eye, just as her artwork is a throng of paradoxes—instinctive yet formulaic, lucid yet complex, and crafted from infinity, but nevertheless complete.
Uman's ebullient visual vocabulary reflects her expansive cross-cultural experiences. Born in Somalia and raised in Kenya, she emigrated to Denmark as a teenager and later to New York as a young adult. Now living and working in upstate New York, Uman paints lavishly detailed, opulently colored worlds replete with gesture, geometry and evocations of the sublime. While these works are executed primarily with oil paint, she also combines acrylic paint, oil stick and collage techniques. An intuitive artist and voracious autodidact, Uman draws upon her memories of East African childhood, rigorous education in traditional Arabic calligraphy, deep engagement with dreams, and fascination with kaleidoscopic color and design. With nods to self-portraiture and fictional topographies, Uman's paintings fluidly navigate in-between realms to explore both the physical and spiritual, intertwining abstraction, figuration, meditative patterning and a reverence for the natural world.
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Uman
I Want Everything Now 4 May - 17 Jun 2023 -
The Earth, That Is Sufficient
15 Jul - 1 Sep 2021Nicola Vassell Gallery is pleased to present, The Earth, That is Sufficient. The assembled, multi-generational group enlists various narrative methodologies to describe landscape in traditional terms and as new terrain...Read more
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Nicola Vassell Gallery enters a new partnership with Hauser & Wirth to co-represent Uman
November 28, 2023 -
Uman’s Studio in Upstate New York is a Portal to a Kaleidoscopic World
Meka Boyle, Elephant Magazine, June 16, 2023 -
The New Yorker: "Limitless pleasures await", Andrea K. Scott on Uman
Andrea K. Scott, The New Yorker, May 26, 2023 -
Uman: I Want Everything Now Featured in The New York Times 'What To See in N.Y.C. Galleries in May'
The New York Times, May 17, 2023 -
Uman featured in The Brooklyn Rail, Interview with Chris Martin
Chris Martin, The Brooklyn Rail, May 1, 2023 -
An Elegant Return to Form at Independent Art Fair
Will Heinrich, The New York Times, May 5, 2022 -
‘THE EARTH, THAT IS SUFFICIENT’ OPENS AT NICOLA VASSELL GALLERY
Shelton Boyd-Griffith, Grazia Magazine, July 20, 2021 -
New York Galleries: What to See Right Now
Roberta Smith, The New York Times, July 24, 2019
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Art Basel Miami Beach
8 - 10 Dec 2023Nicola Vassell is pleased to present The Blues, the gallery's first presentation in the Galleries sector at Art Basel Miami Beach . The group presentation...Read more -
Independent
6 - 8 May 2022Nicola Vassell Gallery is pleased to present a new series of paintings by Uman, whose dynamic paintings “present a multiplicity; alongside the juxtaposition of elements,...Read more