Gallery Brulhart proudly announces its participation to the inaugural Africa Basel artfair presenting paintings by Nigerian artist Taiye Idahor.
Taiye is an accomplished artist working through drawing, sculpture, and collage. More recently, she also usespainting and printmaking to articulate ideas of women’s identity while using hair as a consistent visual language in her work.
Her series “I see Women as Trees” and “Wade in the Water” have been widely acclaimed for their unique expressiveness and are well on their way to achieving iconic status.
Gallery Brulhart is privileged to show new works by Taiye Idahor, at Africa Basel.
See the collection of available works here
Curatorial text by Zama Phakathi
Taiye Idahor’s Wade in the Water and I See Women as Trees series engage in a profound dialogue about heritage, identity, and the interconnectedness of women’s histories. Through these works, Idahor transforms hair into a potent symbol that traverses themes of movement, rootedness, and self-discovery, inviting viewers to contemplate the enduring legacies of ancestry.
In Wade in the Water, hair becomes a vast sea that women must navigate, symbolising the turbulent journey through lineage and history. Drawing from the spiritual hymn “Wade in the Water,” the series evokes survival, freedom, and the pursuit of identity. Women appear as floaters or swimmers in this sea of hair, their heads emerging as islands in an ocean of memory and ancestry. The ambiguity of their direction reflects the ongoing search for belonging, home, and self-definition, while the ocean’s strands act as lifelines binding generations in a collective presence.
The ocean imagery in Wade in the Water resonates with the rooted figures in I See Women as Trees. Here, Idahor envisions women as embodiments of strength and endurance, their long, dark hair trailing like tree roots across the earth. These roots serve as a visual metaphor for connection - to the land, each other, and ancestral origins. Hair, as a recurrent motif, becomes a tangible link that unites past and present, individual and collective, in an ongoing narrative of resilience.
Both series explore the theme of incompletion. In I See Women as Trees, partially constructed spaces in each piece suggest lives and journeys that are still unfolding, mirroring the women’s personal or spiritual growth. Similarly, the women in Wade in the Water navigate an open yet uncertain expanse, reinforcing the idea of identity as a fluid, dynamic process.
The biblical verse “I see men as trees” finds new life in Idahor’s work as a testament to women’s rootedness and agency. However, even with this grounding, questions of emancipation linger, creating a thematic bridge between the two series. This interplay between movement and stability, memory and freedom, forms a poignant narrative thread, positioning Idahor’s works as profound meditations on the complexities of identity and belonging.
