Sim Smith is delighted to announce Kemi Onabulé’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, Solastalgia. The exhibition presents a new body of work centered on the term solastalgia, coined by the philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe the emotional distress caused by environmental change close to home. Through this new body of paintings, Onabulé examines the psychological and emotional impacts of ecological loss, displacement, and transformation in beautiful yet indeterminate landscapes that invite viewers to reflect on their own relationships to place and asking how painting can hold both beauty and loss in a time of environmental uncertainty.
Rooted in personal observation and collective experience, Onabulé’s work reflects a sense of mourning for familiar landscapes that are altered by climate change, unrest, and environmental degradation. The work focuses on intimate environments—places once associated with comfort, identity, and belonging—that have become unfamiliar or destabilized. In this case the paintings centre on an island, each painting rotating through different vistas. Refuge is sought in nature in this exhibition, in the sun and the skies and in trees and branches that seem to cocoon and shelter from the outside world.
It is the first time Onabulé has created an entire exhibition on board, pushing the materiality of paint across a surface that allows her to fully explore her painterly vernacular. The works are framed by the artist in Sapele, a wood from the city of Sapele in Nigeria, a place near the town Onabulé’s father comes from. Onabulé found this wood by chance and it was only on speaking to her father about the framing process that she found this connection. The material serendipitously ties Onabulé to familiar landscapes and personal histories, a convergence of the real, the remembered and the imagined in real time. These paintings are exciting and fluid in their making, they slip and drip and breathe. The vital hand of the artist is evident and remains on the surface far outside of the studio, with paintings that still look wet and with details within the landscape that appear as though they might still be moving in the breeze.
Onabulé is world-building across various scales in this exhibition. From zoomed in microcosms of leafy topographies and terrains of the body to larger works that depict a more wholistic scene, Onabulé creates works that balance beauty and unease, inviting viewers to confront their own relationships to place and loss. The imagery often oscillates between memory and reality, capturing the tension between what once was and what remains. By visualizing solastalgia, Onabulé contributes to a growing cultural dialogue around climate anxiety and emotional resilience. The work encourages reflection, empathy, and awareness, positioning art as a space for processing ecological grief and imagining new forms of connection to a changing world.
