IN an age of digital preoccupation, Urunwa Art, which is the professional name of Chidimma Urunwa Ikegwuonu presents a contrast in her exhibition, Catch-Up, at the Orisun Art Gallery.
Rooted fully in the tradition of painting, she reminds us that the brush still has much to say for the present and the eternal. Her exhibition is an unflinching look at form, color, symbolism and narrative, each canvas a world in itself yet part of a large picture.
Catch-Up held in May 2022 is not just an exhibition; it is an assertion. It states that painting, long declared ‘dead’ by segments of the avant-garde, remains capable of evolution technically, thematically, and spiritually.
Across the walls of the Orisun Art Gallery, Chidimma stages a quiet rebellion against trend-based practice. There are no moving images, no projections, no performance relics. What viewers encounter instead are oils and acrylic on canvas layered, textured, deliberate, and rich in formal rigour.
From the outset, Chidimma’s technical prowess as a painter commands attention. Her confident use of oil both for its luminous depth and sculptural surface elevates her compositions beyond illustrative storytelling into sensorial terrain.
In works such as Emerged, The canvas pulses with a very present energy, a drama played out through pigment and brush. This is not just image making; it is image forging. What is also very compelling about Chidimma’s work is her complex use of allegory and symbol through pure visual means.
Her paintings do not depend on text, sound or other structures to be interpreted. The metaphors which come from nature, myth and body transformation are embedded in the formal makeup of the images themselves.
In Empowered Reflections, a figure adorned with cowrie shells merges into a geometry that references circuitry. The image resists a single reading, but its dual evocation of the ancestral and the contemporary unfolds in compositional terms: symmetry offset by gesture, fluid lines meeting angular forms.
This ability to embed content into composition places Chidimma in a lineage of painters who understand that material and message are inseparable. Her surfaces are not decorative but communicative.
Every line, every area of chromatic tension, every modulation of light has purpose. Colour, for instance, is never incidental in her work.
Her use of deep indigo, ochre, and burnt sienna grounds her palette in an earthy, almost sacred register, while flashes of vermilion or teal lend a momentary rupture marking emotional or psychological turning points within the paintings.
The exhibition is structurally balanced yet conceptually daring. The placement of the paintings in the gallery allows for both narrative continuity and thematic contrast.
Works such as Matriarch of Resilience and Beneath the Silence echo each other through recurring visual motifs, fragmented anatomy, veiled faces, concentric patterns but diverge in mood and tonality. One exudes steadiness, the other sorrow.
This careful orchestration of emotional rhythms across canvases demonstrates Chidimma’s maturity as a painter not merely as an image-maker, but as a choreographer of effect.
What sets Catch-Up apart from many contemporary painting shows is its embrace of the mystical not as spectacle, but as inquiry. Her paintings are spiritual spaces. They do not depict religion per se, but they invoke transcendence through abstraction, metaphor, and gesture.
The body, often central to her compositions, is treated not as an object but as a vessel vulnerable yet potent, fractured yet luminous. In her painterly language, bodies become sites of transition, portals of becoming.
This mysticism is never overtly illustrated; rather, it emerges through the artist’s sensitive handling of light and form, and her refusal to render the figure in literal terms.
Equally critical to understanding Chidimma’s practice is her treatment of texture. Her surfaces are richly worked, sometimes to the point of relief.
In a painting like Bound and Becoming, the topography of the canvas mimics the physicality of skin and scar tissue.
Layers of oil build up over one another like memories sedimented over time. The surface becomes a narrative an archive of decisions, erasures, revisions. Viewers are invited to read the painting not only visually but materially: the surface as memory, as ritual, as evidence.
Importantly, Catch-Up never lapses into repetition or visual monotony. Each painting stands alone while contributing to the exhibition’s cumulative impact.
Even within her consistent visual lexicon spirals, veils, stretched limbs, layered symbols there is evident experimentation.
In some works, Chidimma pushes toward abstraction, letting color fields and gestural marks dominate; in others, figuration reasserts itself with quiet clarity. This toggling between abstraction and representation shows an artist who is not confined by a signature style, but who uses painting as a process of inquiry.
Another critical strength of the exhibition is its psychological depth. While the visual elements are immediately striking, it is the emotional resonance that lingers. Her works do not shout; they hum, ache, and whisper.
In them we find themes of endurance, self-reclamation, grief, and becoming not spelled out, but encoded in posture, gaze, and colour. Chidimma’s figures often meet the viewer’s eyes or deliberately avert them, setting up a relational dynamic that is at once intimate and destabilising. There is no voyeurism here; only invitation and reflection.
Ultimately, Catch-Up is not just a showcase of painting; it is a meditation on painting as a form of knowing. She presents not only technical excellence but also a philosophical commitment to the painted surface as a site of deep engagement.
In choosing painting without compromise or multimedia dilution she reasserts the medium’s relevance in contemporary discourse. Her brushwork is not nostalgic; it is urgent. Her images are not decorative; they are declarative.
The exhibition concludes not with finality but with anticipation. In these works, she has not merely “caught up” with contemporary painting; she has carved out a space within it rooted, resonant, and unapologetically painterly.
In this regard, Catch-Up is less about chasing trends and more about pacing oneself toward truth. Chidimma proves that for those who speak in pigment, painting remains a language as potent as ever.
