UMAN

I will sit here and wait for you

June 20 – August 10

FIERMAN presents the gallery’s first solo exhibition with multi-disciplinary artist Uman, entitled I will sit here and wait for you.  The show is comprised of recent painting and sculpture, fusing graphic black and white abstraction and figuration with vivid and lush depictions of the natural world.  The artist works across media, using oil and acrylic paint on canvas, collage on paper and canvas and salvaged objects, old furniture, fleece and wool blankets, among other materials, to create a cohesive visual universe. 

A self-trained artist who emigrated from Somalia via Denmark in her twenties, Uman has for the past several years lived and work in rural upstate New York.  A sense of displacement pervades her practice, as black and gold silhouettes of camels and water vessels abut collaged and painted self-portraits that are at once glamorous and grotesque. Disused and salvaged pieces of furniture become talismanic sculptures that carry textual poetic interlocutions and fuse with animal bones as homespun ritual objects.  The eerie stillness of a bird in the rural night becomes an avatar for the artist herself, a cipher of a self-crafted identity of a singular strength.  

Uman (b. 1980, Somalia) lives and works in upstate New York.  She has had solo shows at White Columns, NY (2015); Louis B. James Gallery, New York (2016); Galerie  Anne de Villepoix, Paris (2017); and at the Outsider Art Fairs in New York and Paris and 1-54 Fair for Contemporary African Art, NY among others. Uman collaborated with Bjarne Melgaard on exhibitions at Ramiken Crucible, New York, and the ICA, London (both 2012). In addition to her gallery show she will have a solo booth presentation with FIERMAN at the NADA Chicago Invitational Art Fair in September 2019.