Maureen Paley is pleased to present An angel is just a messenger, the first solo exhibition of Kayode Ojo at the gallery and in the UK.
His work employs a process of sourcing, collecting and displaying objects. His sculptures reveal how items can confer social status upon their owner, examining the artifice of taste and the aspirations associated with it. Though the sculptures reflect on the markers of excess and accumulation, these carefully staged compositions also embrace the fragility and impractical beauty of their objects.
Drawing materials from fast-fashion websites and online retailers, he integrates the processes of browsing, scrolling, and acquiring into his artistic practice. In his artwork captions, Ojo quotes the original item descriptions as they appeared online, drawing attention to the search-optimised keywords that underpin the algorithmic structures that govern contemporary e-commerce.
Also featured in An angel is just a messenger are examples from an ongoing series of photographs taken in nightlife settings that capture the fleeting interactions, opulence, and eroticism of these spaces. His subjects appear at varying levels of identifiability, commenting on the levels of transparency and the access we are afforded.
The title of the exhibition is drawn from a quote by the artist's father, a devout Evangelical Christian. “My dad says an angel is just a messenger” Ojo commented, “And what is a contemporary artist if not a messenger?”1
Kayode Ojo (b. Cookeville, Tennessee, 1990) lives and works in New York. He is represented by Sweetwater in Berlin who recently presented his solo exhibition Me & U (2024). A year prior, 52 Walker in New York displayed a solo presentation of his work, Eden (2023).
Works by Kayode Ojo are held in the institutional collections of CCS Hessel Museum of Art, New York; MOCA Museum of
Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Stedelijk, Amsterdam; and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.
1 Simon Wu, Kayode Ojo’s Embarrassment of Riches, in Frieze, Issue 227, April 2022.
