Subheadline: In his first solo exhibition with the gallery, the Nigerian-born, Chicago-based artist uses dreamlike figures, fragmented architecture, and shifting landscapes to explore identity, migration, memory, and the possibility of connection amid instability.
When the World Shifts, What Keeps Us Together?
In a time when familiar structures can feel increasingly fragile, what allows people to retain a sense of belonging? For Nigerian artist Luke Agada, the answer may lie not in a fixed place or an unquestioned center of authority, but in the relationships, memories, and acts of imagination through which people continually make meaning.
That question anchors When the Center Holds, Agada’s first solo exhibition with Sean Kelly in New York. On view from September 11 through October 31, 2026, the exhibition brings together new paintings and drawings that consider how identity and connection endure through historical and cultural transformation. Rather than presenting stability as an unquestioned condition, Agada explores it as something continually assembled—often amid uncertainty, displacement, and change. <Cite refs={[“turn463551search0″,”turn463551search3”]}/>
The exhibition’s title offers a subtle reversal of a familiar literary warning. It plays on W. B. Yeats’s poem The Second Coming, with its ominous phrase “the center cannot hold.” Agada turns away from the idea of collapse as the only possible outcome. His center is not a geographical point or a permanent structure. It is relational: a space sustained by memory, adaptation, and the capacity to connect with others.
Figures Between Worlds
Agada’s paintings inhabit spaces that resist easy definition. Figures seem to emerge from, dissolve into, or merge with their surroundings. Architecture breaks apart or becomes fluid, while organic and biomorphic forms occupy landscapes that appear to belong simultaneously to memory, imagination, and an uncertain present.
These are not straightforward depictions of identifiable places. Instead, Agada constructs environments in which boundaries between body and setting, past and present, or one cultural reference and another remain unsettled. The resulting images can feel dreamlike without becoming detached from the realities that inform them.
The work reflects the artist’s sustained interest in contemporary identity through globalization, migration, and postcolonial thought. For people whose lives are shaped by movement across countries, cultures, and systems of power, belonging is rarely a simple matter of origin. It can involve inherited histories, experiences of displacement, and the ongoing work of translating oneself between different worlds. Agada’s hybrid visual forms give this complexity a physical presence. <Cite refs={[“turn463551search0″,”turn463551search5”]}/>
Rather than illustrating these themes literally, the paintings allow them to unfold through their own visual logic. A body may seem to become part of a structure; a landscape may feel less like a backdrop than an extension of psychological experience. Forms overlap, separate, and reassemble, suggesting that identity is not a finished object waiting to be recovered but an evolving condition.
Painting as a Process of Becoming
Agada’s approach to paint is central to this sense of transformation. In the gallery’s exhibition text, he describes beginning with recognizable elements and allowing them to stretch, metamorphose, and overlap until their meanings become more complex. He frames the process as a collaboration with the material itself, attentive to what happens between the figure and the space around it. <Cite refs={[“turn463551search0”]}/>
That method offers a useful way to understand the exhibition’s shifting compositions. Forms do not simply occupy a predetermined space; they appear to change through their encounters with other forms. The image becomes a record of relationships in flux.
The selected works include Of Tempest, Of Dreams (2026), a large oil painting measuring 72 by 84 inches, alongside Sing Over Me (2026), a 72-by-60-inch oil on canvas. The exhibition also includes Manoah I and Manoah II (both 2026), each measuring 36 by 60 inches, as well as charcoal drawings from the Synapses series. Across these works, the movement between painted and drawn surfaces provides different ways to consider the formation and instability of visual meaning. <Cite refs={[“turn463551search0″,”turn463551search4”]}/>
The titles themselves suggest a vocabulary of emotional and imaginative states rather than a single, fixed narrative. Of Tempest, Of Dreams evokes turbulence and possibility in the same breath. Sing Over Me suggests voice, address, or an act of carrying something across a distance. These associations remain open-ended, allowing the works to retain their ambiguity rather than resolve into illustrations of a predetermined message.
A Center That Is Made, Not Inherited
The exhibition’s political and cultural implications emerge through its refusal of rigid categories. Agada’s work considers how identities are shaped by histories and structures, but it also leaves room for agency: the possibility of making connections and constructing meaning even when the surrounding world is unsettled.
In this context, the center is not a position from which everything else is measured. It is a changing point of relation. Memory can resist erasure; identity can survive translation; belonging can persist despite displacement. These are not guarantees of permanence, but forms of continuity that must be maintained and remade.
This distinction gives When the Center Holds its quieter optimism. The paintings do not suggest that uncertainty can simply be overcome or that fragmentation will inevitably resolve into harmony. Instead, they make space for ambiguity as a condition of becoming. Their forms remain in motion, and their environments resist a single, authoritative reading.
That openness is part of the work’s appeal. Viewers are not handed a definitive map of the artist’s imagined world. They are invited to navigate it, to notice how forms connect and separate, and to consider how meaning develops through those encounters.
Holding Space for Possibility
Born in Lagos in 1992, Agada received an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023. His work has appeared in group exhibitions at institutions including the African American Museum in Philadelphia, the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, the Hive Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, and the African Artists’ Foundation in Lagos. He has also participated in artist residencies at MASS MoCA in Massachusetts and Dragon Hill Residence in Cannes, France. He currently lives and works in Chicago. <Cite refs={[“turn463551search0″,”turn463551search2”]}/>
At Sean Kelly, these biographical and intellectual threads converge in a body of work that treats painting as a place where uncertainty can be inhabited rather than escaped. Agada’s compositions do not promise a return to an uncomplicated past or the restoration of a stable world. They propose something more provisional: that coherence can be built through memory, imagination, and relation.
In When the Center Holds, endurance is not a matter of remaining unchanged. It is the ability to adapt without surrendering the possibility of connection. The center holds not because it is immovable, but because people continue to make it meaningful.
