DEBORAH SEGUN: A MOMENT TO MYSELF : @ Saatchi Gallery, (London, UK) Duke of York's HQ
In this body of work I wanted to capture the intentionality of being present in oneself, being in tune with your environment, and creating harmony between the two... Deborah Segun.
Note: This exhibition is a collaboration between BEERS London & Saatchi Gallery. Please note that this exhibition is taking place at Saatchi Gallery located at Duke of York’s HQ, King’s Road, London, SW3 4RY.
BEERS London presents A Moment to Myself, a solo exhibition by Nigerian artist Deborah Segun in collaboration with Saatchi Gallery that questions how the internal self reflects the natural world.
"I began thinking about whether how you feel internally affects how you see your environment, or if the environment actually guided my emotions?" writes Deborah Segun about her solo exhibition A Moment to Myself. Segun's newest body of work continues the artist's introspective deep-dive into ideas of self-reflection, probing pertinent philosophical ideas and a more 'hands-on' approach, through painting.
"In this body of work I wanted to capture the intentionality of being present in oneself, being in tune with your environment, and creating harmony between the two..." writes Segun. Considering the self in relationship to nature has been one of the most enduring and prevalent themes in art, but it wasn't until the German Romanticism of the late 18th century that ideas of nature influencing our physical and psychological selves became popularized. In fact, it wasn't until this time that the modern invention of philosophy as we understand it today began gaining traction. While we may innately feel certain things when we expose ourselves to the natural world, more and more research is proving its benefits on our creative and empathetic selves. In Your Brain on Art, Magsamen and Ross detail the importance of removing yourself from your daily routine and heading specifically away from the city limits. “Nature has a strong effect on our parasympathetic nervous system.” They continue by describing how coming into contact with “plants and vegetation, water and other natural elements" immediately reduces adrenaline, blood pressure, and heart rate after about two hours, and as little as twenty minutes!
For Segun, the natural landscape and the body have almost coalesced into an artistic expression wherein "Mother Earth" becomes anthropomorphized. Here a restful body suggests a curving hillock; a jagged limb refers to our ability to adapt to our surroundings; a calming colour scheme alludes to the peace of mind before bodies of water. The works capture moments of reflection, joy, and even melancholy - similar feelings we might experience in the natural world.
For Segun, these are complex internal landscapes that utilize and transform visual cues often reserved for figurative art into a new genre of painting, existing somewhere between meditative and introspective responses to gestural abstraction, imbued with the intense psychological questioning of figurative or narrative painting, and the compositional arrangements often reserved for landscape.
"I started to respond differently to my environment," she writes in response to her work. "I started to listen to how I responded to places, and I used that to create harmony between environment, body, and a sense of self."
DEBORAH SEGUN (b. 1994, Nigeria) lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria. She obtained a degree in Fashion Design at the Polimoda Institute of Fashion Design and Marketing in Florence, Italy in 2017.
Solo exhibitions include: Letting Yourself Be, The Breeder Gallery, Atehns, Greece (2024); Where Is My Mind?, BEERS London (2023); You Keep Going Through It, I’m Just Coming Back From It, Breeder Gallery, Athens, Greece (2022); The Little Things I Need to Make Me Whole, Ada Gallery, Accra, Ghana (2022); How To Fall In Love, BEERS London, (2021); Being Free, SMO Contemporary Art Gallery, Lagos, Nigeria (2020); Play as Collective, AWCA, ArtxLagos Art Fair, Lagos, Nigeria (2019); Still Life Art Oja, Lagos, Nigeria (2019) and; I Feel Like I Am, Relate Africa, Lagos, Nigeria, (2019).
Group exhibitions include: Ekene Stanley Emecheta and Deborah Segun, The Breeder x The Sunday Painter, London (2024); Family & Friends, BEERS London, London (2023); The Sound of Our Souls, UTA Artist Space, New York (2023); Africa Supernova, Kunsthal KAdE Amersfoort (2023); Eparapo, The Working Girls Forum, A Whitespace Creative Agency, Lagos, Nigeria (2019); Art Oja Portfolio II, Miliki, Lagos, Nigeria (2018); Family & Friends, Wafflesncream, Lagos, Nigeria (2018) and; Polimoda Performance Art & Fashion Show, Florence Italy (2017).
Art Fairs include: 1-54 Contemporary African Fair, London (2024); Art SG, Pearl Lam Galleries (2024); Art Cologne, Pearl Lam Galleries (2023); Frieze London (2023 & 2021); Frieze New York, NY (2021); Armory New York, NY (2021); Frieze Los Angeles, LA (2021); 1-54 Contemporary African Fair, London, (2021); FIAC Paris (2021) and; Affordable Art Fair, Lagos, Nigeria (2019).
