SAMUEL NNOROM : SOLO EXHIBITION

  • SAMUEL NNOROM SOLO EXHIBITION Primo Marella Gallery Lugano is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Samuel Nnorom in...

     SAMUEL NNOROM

    SOLO EXHIBITION

     

     

    Primo Marella Gallery Lugano is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Samuel Nnorom in Switzerland.
     
    Born in 1990 in Isiukwuato, Abia state, Nigeria, he lives and works in Nigeria.
    Samuel Nnorom is a Nigerian artist known for his textile works that weave painting, sculpture and craft into a distinctive visual language. His practice stems from a childhood spent between his father's shoemaker's workshop and his mother's tailor's atelier: environments in which, from an early age, he began to draw and manipulate vivid scraps of fabric.
     
    These experiences converge in research that investigates the construction of identity, individual and collective memory, and the links between personal experience and social context. Fabric, and in particular Ankara - a brightly colored fabric and symbol of cultural belonging in many African communities - becomes for Nnorom not just a material, but a living archive, a means of interrogating the past and shaping visions of the present and future.
  • The centerpiece of his sculptural work is the “bubble,” a form that becomes both physical structure and symbol. As temporary containers of meaning, bubbles allow each work to tell a story, combining material innovation and conceptual depth. Nnorom connects the fluid nature of Ankara fabric, an emblem of African cultural identity, to the cellular and dynamic dimension of his compositions, creating organic forms that evoke the complexity of “social fabric.”
     
    Through this layered poetics, Samuel Nnorom explores how political, cultural, economic and religious forces shape human relationships and contemporary social structures. His works, at once intimate and choral, invite reflection on personal and collective experiences and offer the viewer an active space where art becomes a vehicle for dialogue and transformation.
     
    Nnorom is renowned for his dynamic textile-based sculptures that interweave painting, sculpture, and craft into a powerful and multilayered visual language. His work transcends form to probe deeper into questions of identity, memory, community, and social structure.
  • Growing up amidst the industrious spaces of his father’s shoemaking workshop and his mother’s tailoring business, Nnorom began drawing at...
    Growing up amidst the industrious spaces of his father’s shoemaking workshop and his mother’s tailoring business, Nnorom began drawing at...
    Growing up amidst the industrious spaces of his father’s shoemaking workshop and his mother’s tailoring business, Nnorom began drawing at...
    Growing up amidst the industrious spaces of his father’s shoemaking workshop and his mother’s tailoring business, Nnorom began drawing at...
    Growing up amidst the industrious spaces of his father’s shoemaking workshop and his mother’s tailoring business, Nnorom began drawing at...
    Growing up amidst the industrious spaces of his father’s shoemaking workshop and his mother’s tailoring business, Nnorom began drawing at...
    Growing up amidst the industrious spaces of his father’s shoemaking workshop and his mother’s tailoring business, Nnorom began drawing at...
    Growing up amidst the industrious spaces of his father’s shoemaking workshop and his mother’s tailoring business, Nnorom began drawing at the age of nine, captivated by the colors and textures of discarded fabric scraps. These formative experiences continue to shape his practice, which fuses personal memory with broader cultural narratives. His sculptures—soft yet structurally bold—are created using stitched, knotted, and rolled foam and textiles, particularly Ankara wax fabric, which becomes both material and metaphor. While the origins of this material are contested—linked variously to Indonesian batik, European trade, and even a city in Turkey—the fabric has been fully embraced in Africa, where its vibrant patterns and cultural symbolism have been indigenized and reinterpreted. Ankara’s history reflects colonial entanglements and acts of cultural reclamation, embodying the tensions between imposed narratives and self-defined identities.
  • Samuel Nnorom, Healing Deeply, 2024
     
     
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    nnorom's bubbles

    Healing Deeply, 2024
    In Nnorom’s sculptural work, the bubble emerges as a recurring form—simultaneously delicate and resilient, ephemeral and permanent. These soft, voluminous spheres serve as containers of meaning, holding stories, memories, and ideas in suspended form. Much like the uncertain narrative of Ankara’s origin, bubbles represent fragile but potent spaces of identity negotiation, cultural synthesis, and temporal reflection.
    Through his organic, cellular compositions, Nnorom engages in a material and conceptual exploration of the “fabric of society.” His work reflects on how political, economic, cultural, and religious forces shape interpersonal relationships and collective realities. By manipulating materials commonly seen as waste—scraps, foam, surplus fabric—he elevates the discarded, celebrating resilience and reinvention.
     
    Each sculpture is both a personal expression and a choral statement: a physical manifestation of the dialogues, contradictions, and connections that define contemporary African—and global—social experience. His pieces invite the viewer not just to observe, but to participate in a layered reflection on belonging, memory, and future possibility.

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    In Samuel Nnorom’s hands, fabric becomes more than textile: it becomes testimony, archive, and agent of change. His work offers a transformative space where art triggers dialogue, reflection and new perspectives.

     

     

    • Samuel Nnorom, Existence, 2024
      Samuel Nnorom, Existence, 2024
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    • Samuel Nnorom , Shades and likeness, 2025
      Samuel Nnorom , Shades and likeness, 2025
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    • Samuel Nnorom , Reclaiming Ownership, 2025
      Samuel Nnorom , Reclaiming Ownership, 2025
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    sculptural works

    a 360 degrees vision of the artist
    Men as Tree II and When Growth is Constant allow for a three-dimensional experience of their alluring forms. They, various strands of textile bubbles that mimic stringed beads cling to, interweave with, and penetrate one another to create dynamic abstract forms of a dancing figure. 
  • The spellbinding encounter with the works of Samuel Nnorom is an invitation into a mesmerising world where beautifully orchestrated colours and the iterative use of globular forms animate the visual energy of its textile landscape. It is also a world ruled by uncertainties, a place where truth, conspiracy, and identity are not only vigorously contested, negotiated, deconstructed, and reconstructed, but also function as the artist’s primary inquisitorial tools for interrogating the varying subjectivities that shape the social, political, and cultural spheres of society. This solo exhibition by the artist, offers insight into how the artist uses bubble-like structures created with African wax prints (Ankara fabric) to conceptually explore the multifarious landscape of human experiences.
     
    Nnorom’s fast-rising profile and legitimate posturing as one of the most exciting contemporary Nigerian artists derive from the dynamic and fascinating landscape of his textile-based sculpture installations. The stylistic architecture of his art is firmly rooted in the culture of radical practice that foregrounds the art tradition of the Fine and Applied Arts Department of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he is presently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree (MFA) in sculpture. Although the idea of using textiles as a medium for artistic expression started before his postgraduate studies, it was his exposure to the intellectual and experimental cultures of the Nsukka art department that enabled him to redirect and refocus the conceptual and experimental dispositions of his studio practice, setting his art practice on the path of its current stylistic trajectory. In a personal conversation, the artist acknowledged that it was at the Nsukka art department that the burning desire to critically and robustly explore the bubble concept was fully ignited. 
     
    - George C. Odoh
    Senior Lecturer Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Nigeria, Nsukka
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  • SAMUEL NNOROM 

     

    SOLO EXHIBITION

     

     

    PRIMO MARELLA GALLERY LUGANO

     

    FROM 12 MAY TO 15 JUNE