Naomi Lisiki | Vespertine

July 25 – August 23, 2024

Sargent’s Daughters is pleased to present Vespertine, the debut solo show of Brooklyn-based artist Naomi Lisiki (b.1997, Guadeloupe, French Caribbean).

Originally born and raised in the French West Indies, nature was a constant part of Lisiki’s life and serves as an important source of inspiration. Working within abstraction, she channels her emotions to explore ideas around womanhood, spirituality and philosophy. Vespertine relates to the evening—in botany, a vespertine flower is one that opens or blooms in the evening.  Lisiki’s own work was mostly created in the evening, recording the transformations in her life and surroundings and visually expressing her internal “landscapes” to propose a new narrative of her life and identity as a woman from the Caribbean diaspora.

Lisiki employs abstraction with an expansive range of marks, forming worlds of airy and atmospheric visions. Both expressive and repetitive, they are meant to be markers of time and of sensorial experiences. Resembling cyanotypes or alternative printing processes, the colors and delicate shapes in her paintings reference landscapes, bodies, repeated shapes in nature and act as visual memories. 

As Lisiki notes "The painting becomes an object of research and discovery. Like the birth of a star or the formation of seashells on ocean tides, my aim is to create paintings that feed into themselves and become their own natural phenomenon. I aim to express a sensation, to encapsulate the experience of living into the painting form.''

For Lisiki the paintings are supported by an invisible intrinsic truth of Nature’s constant cyclical renewing and rewiring of itself.  In this same way her paintings feed into themselves and become their own natural phenomenon, recording passages of time and sensation in mark and motion.

Naomi Lisiki (b. 1997, Guadeloupe, French Caribbean) is a visual artist living and working in Brooklyn. She received her B.F.A in Fine Arts from The Cooper Union in 2018 and her M.F.A in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2020. She has appeared in two group exhibitions at Sargent's Daughters. This is her first solo exhibition.

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