Greene Naftali

Brandon Ndife

Brandon Ndife, Southern Comfort, 2023

Biography

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Brandon Ndife, Installation view, *Down to the Spoons and Forks*, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 2022

Brandon Ndife's sculptures fuse forms that resemble domestic objects with elements derived from the natural world. Through hand-building, painting, and casting in synthetic resin or polyurethane foam, Ndife creates meticulous replicas that keep the readymade tradition at a subtle remove. Expectant with ripening and rot, the works appear like relics unearthed from a distant past or envoys of a dystopian future. Ndife is drawn to domestic items, in part, for their capacity to index American life under capitalism—wrought with racial, class, and now ecological disparities in all that we touch. In his assemblages, wild growth seems poised to overtake the built environment, with all its structural exclusions. For him, the works "operate as portals that get us thinking about objects that are larger than our systems, larger than ourselves.”

Brandon Ndife, Installation view, *Soft Water Hard Stone: New Museum Triennial*, New Museum, New York, 2021

Brandon Ndife (b. 1991, Hammond, Indiana) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Greene Naftali, New York (2024); Matthew Brown Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York (2022); Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut (2022); Bureau, New York (2020, 2019); Shoot the Lobster, New York (2018); and Interstate Projects, Brooklyn (2016).

Ndife's work is currently on view in the exhibition, A Garden of Promise and Dissent, at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut. Other notable group exhibitions include Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2023); Greene Naftali, New York (2023); Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium (2022); Soft Water Hard Stone, New Museum Triennial, New York (2021); and the Aspen Art Museum (2020). A graduate of The Cooper Union and Bard College MFA, Ndife has work in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.