Chinemerem 'Eme' Omeh: The Strange Beauty of Impermanence
|
The Strange Beauty of Impermanence September 5 through October 25, 2025 ACA Galleries 173 Tenth Avenue, New York
Opening Reception: Friday September 5, 7-9pm
New York, NY… ACA Galleries is delighted to present The Strange Beauty of Impermanence, the highly anticipated New York debut of Nigerian born artist Chinemerem ‘Eme’ Omeh, a compelling new voice in the gallery’s contemporary program. On view from September 5 through October 25, 2025, the exhibition marks Omeh’s first solo presentation with ACA. A meditation on memory and metamorphosis, this new body of work traces a deeply personal journey through childhood, education, and identity. Each painting is layered with emotional residue and recurring motifs that speak to the complexity of becoming. Guided by what the artist describes as a need “not to paint beautiful works… but to paint the truth,” Omeh has created not merely an exhibition, but a reckoning — tender, unflinching, and luminously resilient.
Born in Nsukka, Nigeria in 1994, Omeh turned to painting as a response to early struggles with dyslexia and a disconnection from language. Traditional education often felt alienating. Art offered a means of expression that was both intuitive and honest. His work draws from this duality, using images to articulate what words could not. Across the exhibition, viewers encounter classrooms, open doors, tiled floors, blackboards and other charged spaces that reflect the emotional terrain of becoming.
In Conversations with the Forgotten Self, a small red-orange figure confronts a kneeling, faceless adult. The child stands face to face with the man he has become. “This work is a visual confrontation,” Omeh writes, “a sacred conversation between shadow and substance. Growth has occurred, yes, but not without cost.”
In Theater of the Unseen, a child stands alone onstage facing rows of empty chairs. A glowing horse looks back—not an audience, but a witness. “This is not merely a stage,” the artist reflects. “It is the mind. And these are not just figures. They are the soul in rehearsal, wrestling with the silence of the world.”
In Vestiges of Broken Creed, Omeh revisits the site of past academic struggle—a childhood classroom where mathematics once symbolized failure. The space, now overgrown and suffused with light, suggests release. “I sit in that room as a figure of memory,” he notes, “not defeated, but reflective. This work is about questioning the systems that once defined us and realizing they no longer hold the pen.”
Themes of family, memory and myth anchor the exhibition. In Idea of Camaraderie, based on an ancestral photograph, Omeh explores the layered dynamics of kinship. “The family, encapsulated within a red square, serves as a symbolic testament to the sanctity of bloodline. A realm where conscious choices, rather than mere biological ties, solidify their unity.”
The Strange Beauty of Impermanence is a testament to the power of painting as a language of introspection and transformation. Through deeply personal imagery, Omeh confronts past systems, reclaims memory, and reimagines identity on his own terms. His work offers a resonant space to reflect on where we come from and the stories we inherit, revise, and ultimately choose to carry forward.
Chinemerem ‘Eme’ Omeh (b. 1994, Nsukka, Nigeria) holds a BA in Fine and Applied Arts from the University of Nigeria and is currently based in Atlanta, Georgia. Working primarily in acrylic, oil, ink and mixed media, Omeh creates richly layered paintings that explore the architecture of memory, identity, and resilience. His practice draws deeply from personal history and Nigerian folklore, navigating the spaces between individual experience and collective cultural memory. Omeh’s work has been exhibited in New York, London, Miami and across the United States. |
|
