ODILI DONALD ODITA: SHADOWLAND

DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY is pleased to present Shadowland, an exhibition of paintings, photo collages, and a mural by Odili Donald Odita as well as two works from the 1970s by the artist’s father, Dr. Okechukwu Emmanuel Odita.

January 15 - February 28, 2026

Shadowland features paintings, photo collages and site specific mural, and considers three distinct bodies of work—current, past, and inherited—as integral parts of a creative whole. This not only reveals the evolution of Odita’s formal interests, but also connects his practice as a Nigerian American artist to familial and geopolitical legacies.

This expanded presentation makes clear the artist’s longstanding engagement with some of our most insoluble contemporary questions regarding power: how it manifests, how we perceive it, and how it can be confronted, reclaimed, or created from nothing. At the same time, Odita looks to painting itself as a site of infinite potential, one that fosters possibilities for connection and coexistence across borders, generations, and experiences.

Framing this exhibition is the notion of the shadowland, evoking a time and place thrown into darkness. But just as oppressive ideologies foment in landscapes of ignorance and fear, so too can shadows create protected zones, out of public view, for political action and creative freedom, as in underground movements of resistance and experimentation.

Seen as energetic arenas of play, Odita’s abstractions wield a liberated, sensory force all their own. Throughout the exhibition, shadows appear where singular hues and values meet, while shapes suggestive of negative space become interchangeable with those forms the eye perceives as material. Interlocking rays and tessellations subvert hierarchical ideas of composition by deemphasizing any presumed center, instead directing the eye across, inside, and out toward peripheries.