Art Rug Projects by Soutzoglou in collaboration with Nigerian-American artist, Chioma Ebinama, have created six handmade rugs for the exhibition The Eleventh House.
For the first time, Ebinama creates a series of rugs, handtufted in silk and wool. She deploys many of the recurrent symbols that populate the universe of her work: the eye (seeing inward and outward), the python (the messenger of Mami Wata), and the butterfly (the mark of mortality and the ephemeral). The Eleventh House represents yet another way through which the artist applies her aesthetic and philosophic concerns to real life.
A natural storyteller with a background in sociology and illustration, Ebinama draws from a wealth of visual resources ranging from the craft and ritual traditions of West Africa, to the watercolours of the Indian Subcontinent and the popular iconography of Japanese comics. She is interested in how the archetypal images across craft , religions, and myths of many cultures—the visual culture of the common man—reflect a universal story about how we collectively navigate change, violence, beauty, prejudice and nonconformity.
This is Art Rug Projects' 4th artist collaboration and the second project with The Breeder.
Exhibition dates: May 11, 2023 - June 3, 2023 at The Breeder (45 Iasonos st., Athens)
Artist Bio
Chioma Ebinama is a Nigerian-American artist working primarily in watercolour. She is based in Athens, Greece and represented by Maureen Paley, London. Her expanding oeuvre also includes ceramics, soft sculpture, and wearable art. Her recent exhibitions include A Spiral Shell at Maureen Paley in London, tipota at Fortnight Institute, Lay all your love on me at Salon94 in New York and Leave the thorns and take the rose at The Breeder in Athens. She is currently exhibiting a body of work in the Hayward Gallery touring exhibition Hollow Earth: Art, Caves, and The Subterranean Imaginary developed in partnership with Nottingham Contemporary. Her work can be found in the Whitney Museum Collection, Perez Museum Collection and LACMA Collection. This year she was awarded the Ezra Jack Keat Honor Award for her illustrations for Emile and the Field, written by Kevin Young, the director of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and published by Penguin-Random House in 2022. She is currently working on her first manuscript for a children’s book set to be published in 2024 by Penguin Random House. She is pleased to be sharing a new body of work this summer at Maureen Paley, Morena di Luna, in Hove.
