Uman: I Love You After Everything

Nicola Vassell is pleased to present I Love You After Everything, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Uman, the artist’s second solo presentation with the gallery, in equal partnership with Hauser and Wirth. The exhibition traces Uman’s rhapsodic abstraction through the instrument of geometry, with works that unfold according to the unorthodoxy of imagination and the formal logic of the grid. These contrary forces produce a mutation of form where properties of lines, points and surfaces that were once inspired by the rolling hills, silence and mud of countryside life are replaced with the repetition and rhythm of city buildings, windows and streetlights.

Coinciding with Uman: After all the things…—the artist’s first solo institutional exhibition currently on view at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum—and preceding an upcoming survey exhibition at the Hessel Museum of Art in summer 2026, I Love You After Everything is a vivid manifestation of Uman’s continuous process of scrutiny and synthesis.

Uman’s practice is deeply informed by the geographic sprawl of her life: childhood in Somalia and Kenya, adolescence in Denmark, early adult life in New York City and current residence in upstate New York, all of which has resulted in the formation of an expansive lexicon of symbols and forms, a vast trove of knowledge and wisdom that she draws upon during the creative process. These myriad experiences and influences have been expressed and transfigured through her unique approach to abstraction, one which embraces the grid as a site of "many paintings living inside one frame, each square possessing its own breath."

Though she uses the grid first as a way of constructing painterly space, Uman eventually explores it as a language unto itself—one capable of polarity where compositions hold and divide, exert looseness and discipline, revel in chaos and order. A suite of four paintings—each titled after the grid—combine radiant, jewel-like colors with armatures that move between pattern and spontaneity, presenting singular visions that combine the terrestrial and the otherworldly, the personal and the mystical. In other paintings the grid is a more deconstructed form. Stitch and gesture propel diagonally or in waves across the picture plane, appearing as metaphoric mesh within an overall composition.

Rather than deploy the grid as a totalizing schema—one that reduces image and idea to a mere formula—Uman instead wields it as an essential tool for interpreting the world while at the same time understanding its provisional nature, as something to be used much more than adhered to. In a diptych where doorframes are evoked as being the containers for her splintered, kaleidoscopic geometries, Uman reminds us that these are, ultimately, portals and passageways to new realities.

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