New York · 11/09/2026
Luke Agada: When the Center Holds
When the Center Holds is the first solo exhibition at Sean Kelly of the Nigerian artist Luke Agada. Bringing together a new body of paintings and drawings, it considers how meaning and belonging endure through periods of profound historical and cultural change. "I'm not necessarily referring to a fixed political, geographical, or institutional center," Agada explains, "rather thinking about something more relational, and the things that make the center to endure can be things that help us to make meaning in periods of instability or when the structures around us have become unstable." Agada's practice explores the changing nature of contemporary identity through the lens of globalization, migration, and postcolonial thought. His enigmatic compositions are inhabited by incorporeal figures, fragmented architecture, and biomorphic forms set within dreamlike landscapes untethered from any fixed geography. Suspended between memory and imagination, these hybrid forms embody identities continually shaped by movement across histories, cultures, and systems of power. "I find ways to collaborate with the material of paint itself and consider what's going on between the figure and the space around it," he says. "I begin by using recognizable elements and gradually allow it to transform, to stretch, to metamorphose and to overlap one another until meaning becomes more complex." The title plays on William Butler Yeats's poem "The Second Coming," with its famous line "the centre cannot hold," which Agada reimagines in a more hopeful light. Rather than a seat of fixed authority, the center becomes for him a space of constant negotiation—where memory resists erasure, identity survives translation, and belonging is sustained in spite of displacement. His paintings occupy the intervals in which transformation unfolds, presenting suspension not as paralysis but as a state of becoming. Bodies dissolve into fluid architectures and landscapes that refuse permanence. Fragmented forms merge and separate, suggesting that identity is not recovered but continually composed through adaptation and relation. These psychologically charged environments resist any single reading, embracing ambiguity as a space in which continuity is actively built rather than inherited. The exhibition reflects on quieter forms of endurance, proposing that coherence is not a given but something continually assembled through memory, imagination, and connection. In Agada's work, painting becomes a place where uncertainty is neither resolved nor escaped but lived with openness and resilience—a timely meditation on how we sustain meaning in an increasingly fractured world. As the artist puts it: "We retain the capacity to remember, and to imagine, and to relate to one another, to continually compose new forms of meaning and belonging." Born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1992, Luke Agada received his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023. His work has appeared in group exhibitions at institutions including the African American Museum in Philadelphia; the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas; the Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; and the African Artists' Foundation, Lagos. His awards and fellowships include Newcity's Breakout Artist (2024), the James Nelson Raymond Fellowship Award (2023), the Janet and Russell Doubleday Award at the Art Students League of New York (2022), the Helen Frankenthaler Award at SAIC (2022), the George and Ann Siegel Award at SAIC (2021), and a Teaching Fellowship at SAIC (2023). He was an artist-in-residence at MASS MoCA in 2023 and at Dragon Hill Residence in Cannes in 2025. Agada lives and works in Chicago.
