Exhibition: Ndife Statements

Bureau is pleased to present a project by New York-based sculptor Brandon Ndife for Art Basel Statements, 2022. Ndife’s sculptures are composed predominantly of domestic items – sometimes handmade, sometimes cast from originals – assembled together and intertwined with vegetal forms which create a sense of abundant decomposition.

For Statements, Ndife shows a large and complex horizontal floor sculpture: a kind of composite barque built out of table legs, drawers, headboards and a grandfather clock fused together and intertwined with natural forms that ooze and proliferate from its crevices. On the wall, a smaller wall work appears to grow, tumorous and vine-like, serving to balance the gravity of the central work.

This project for Statements shows a shift to a larger scale for Ndife and grows out of new techniques used for his first outdoor commission which debuted at Storm King Art Center in upstate New York this May.

Ndife’s work aptly offers a vision of post-disaster regrowth, conjuring environments where our familiar, domestic spaces have become host to new life or may be in the process of a metamorphosis. Ndife’s compositions also resemble a kind of provisional shelter that might be built from an accumulation of remnant and throwaway forms. The proliferation of fragmented and discarded furniture references the urban realities of mass evictions, the trauma of displacement and how the lack of secure housing impacts the poor and communities of color. Ndife reclaims the disposable, enmeshing it with swelling and burgeoning natural forms to create new structures which sit at the intersection of ruin and shrine.

“Inside of the sculptures there exists an ecosystem of vegetation and other sources of abundance – some bordering on the verge of decay. The juxtapositions of growth and loss, grotesque and beauty, and insider and outsider all operate within our collective reckoning with inevitable change.” – Brandon Ndife

Brandon Ndife (b. 1991 Hammond, IN; lives and works in New York) received a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. Solo and two-person exhibitions include: Shade Tree, Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY, 2022; Down to the Spoons and Forks, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Middletown CT, 2022; MY ZONE, Bureau, New York, 2020; Minor twin worlds with Diane Severin Nguyen, Bureau, New York, 2019; Selected group exhibitions include Gravity, a proposal, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; A Través, James Cohan, New York; New Museum Triennial: Soft Water Hard Stone, New Museum, New York, 2021; Cascadence, Altman Siegel, San Francisco, 2021; Material Conditions, Matthew Brown Gallery, Los Angeles, 2020.

Works on view

Floor: Maroon, 2022 Wood, cast foam, polyurethane resin, aquaresin, fabric, earth pigment, paint 55 × 108 × 60 in. (140 × 274 × 152 cm) Wall: Tempus Fugit (Time Flies), 2022 Wood, cast foam, polyurethane resin, aquaresin, fabric, paint 27 × 18 × 20 in. (69 × 46 × 51 cm)