Nicola Frimpong at Cell Project Space

July 8–August 14, 2022

The debut solo exhibition by British artist Nicola Frimpong is on display at Cell Project Space. An assortment of the artist’s work from 2012 to the present is included in the exhibition. Ding-Dong; Frimpong! is a persistent body of paintings created completely on A4 paper and mostly in gouache, ink, and watercolour. It aims to explore narratives in art created over the past decade that have grown more urgent.

The artist primarily works alone and in solitude at home. Intimate in scale and evoking the format of a personal diary, Frimpong’s auto-fictional paintings reveal dizzyingly complex encrypted systems that are derived from the colonial mash-up of British history, pop, and institutional culture. As all manner of accelerated nightmares, perversions, scatological, and libidinous excesses are played out in the artist’s playground of brown and pink bodies, which wilfully undermine normative constructions of self and other, the level of saturation and comic book detail in her drawing defies the demand to absorb the work in full grasp.

In Frimpong’s thorough and multidimensional paintings, a responsive voice that navigates the artist’s neurodiversity, gender, and ethnicity among situations of oppressive cultural and class oppression is revealed through sharp observation and biting satire.

Nicola Frimpong was born in Epsom, where she currently resides and works, and is of Ghanaian heritage. After earning an MFA from Wimbledon School of Art in 2009, the artist was chosen for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries Institute of Contemporary Art in London and the Liverpool Biennial in Liverpool in 2012–13. She participated in African Diaspora Artists in the 21st Century in 2014, an exhibition coordinated by author and academic Paul Goodwin in association with the Institute of International Visual Arts and the Department of International Development at King’s College London (Iniva).Frimpong participated in No Soul For Sale (2010) Museum of Everything, Tate Modern, London 2010 and INTERCOURSE 3, (2013) curated by Gregor Muir, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Her work is featured in the survey publication, Stick to the Skin: African American and Black British Art, 1965–2015 by writer, Celeste-Marie Bernier, published by University of California Press in 2019 and Paper, exhibition and catalogue, Saatchi Gallery, London, by writer Ben Street.