Art Basel Miami 2025

For this year’s edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, Rele (Booth D18) will present works drawn from the gallery’s ongoing programming featuring works by Peju Alatise, Marcellina Akpojotor, Tonia Nneji, IyunOla Sanyaolu, Harmonia Rosales, and David Ngaji.

Peju Alatise (Nigeria) presents new works from her Almajiri series, celebrating the imagination, spirit, and inner worlds of children. Through sculptural paintings composed of aluminum, resin, wood, and steel, she transforms their stories into vibrant scenes of play, possibility, and self-discovery. Her work uplifts the resilience and creativity of youth, offering the body as a space of hope, wonder, and becoming.

Marcellina Akpojotor (Nigeria) creates richly textured, layered portraits that explore femininity, identity, and the intergenerational ties that shape women’s lives. Working primarily with discarded Ankara fabric sourced from local fashion houses, she reanimates these scraps as vessels of cultural memory. In her hands, the fabric becomes both material and metaphor—its patterns carrying shared histories, energies, and the daily rhythms of family life.

Tonia Nneji (Nigeria) explores the politics of female autonomy through abstract painting shaped by Lagos’ social dynamics. In this series, she expands figuration into sweeping, emotive fields of color, where bodies emerge and dissolve within layered gestures. Her vivid compositions take on themes of moral judgment, vulnerability, and the refusal of shame, offering scenes in which women assert presence, dignity, and interiority on their own terms.

IyunOla Sanyaolu (Nigeria) explores emotional and psychological landscapes through textured abstraction. Her practice is built on the push and pull of opposing forces—charcoal and paint, flat washes and thick impasto, figuration and abstraction, order and mess. As she brings more drawing into her paintings, these tensions become even more visible, revealing the inner negotiations that come with belonging, displacement, and change. She is currently an artist-in-residence at The Tracey Emin Residency in the United Kingdom.

Harmonia Rosales (United States) reimagines canonical European religious imagery through Afro-diasporic spirituality. Veiling Orishas within Christian iconography, her paintings assert that African divinity never disappeared; it endured in disguise. This visual layering reflects how African spiritual traditions were suppressed yet survived under colonial rule, hidden in plain sight, never extinguished. Working with 24k gold leaf and hand-mixed egg tempera in the Old Masters tradition, she builds luminous surfaces and textile-like details that honor sacred histories and cultural memory.

David Ngaji (Nigeria) explores collective violence through allegorical figuration. Through dark humor, psychology, and existential inquiry, David’s paintings explore what it means to exist within inherited systems of meaning, those that define our beliefs, values, and even our lives before we are aware of them. His most recent works, including “Patrick after Caravaggio” and “Scapegoat,” confront the tension between how the world ought to be and how it is: absurd, painful, and often unjust.