Chioma Ebinama
The Eleventh House

The Breeder is pleased to present The Eleventh House, Chioma Ebinama’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The title refers to the Eleventh House in astrology which represents the house of the collective, community and humanity; a vision of what the future could be; the house of the visionary.

A natural storyteller with a background in sociology and illustration, Ebinama draws from a wealth of visual resources ranging from the craft and ritual traditions of West Africa, to the watercolours of the Indian Subcontinent and the popular iconography of Japanese comics. She is interested in how the archetypal images across craft , religions, and myths of many cultures—the visual culture of the common man—reflect a universal story about how we collectively navigate change, violence, beauty, prejudice and nonconformity.

For the first time, Ebinama creates a series of rugs, handwoven in silk and wool. She deploys many of the recurrent symbols that populate the universe of her work: the eye (seeing inward and outward), the python (the messenger of Mami Wata), and the butterfly (the mark of mortality and the ephemeral). The rugs are paired with her works on paper, peculiar interior spaces and objects her protagonists would inhabit. The Eleventh House represents yet another way through which the artist applies her aesthetic and philosophic concerns to real life.

The handtufted rugs were created in collaboration with Art Rug Projects by Soutzoglou.
Art Rug Projects by Soutzoglou, based in Athens, focuses on the interactive collaboration with Greek and international contemporary artists whose selected works are transformed into handmade rugs and tapestries as original works of art, either as limited editions or as unique pieces. Every collaboration is an opportunity for the artist to discover a new medium, to expand their practice in new ways, imagining the rug as their canvas.

Chioma Ebinama is a Nigerian-American artist working primarily in watercolour. She is based in Athens, Greece and represented by Maureen Paley, London. Her expanding oeuvre also includes ceramics, soft sculpture, and wearable art. Her recent exhibitions include A Spiral Shell at Maureen Paley in London, tipota at Fortnight Institute, Lay all your love on me at Salon94 in New York and Leave the thorns and take the rose at The Breeder in Athens. She is currently exhibiting a body of work in the Hayward Gallery touring exhibition Hollow Earth: Art, Caves, and The Subterranean Imaginary developed in partnership with Nottingham Contemporary. Her work can be found in the Whitney Museum Collection, Perez Museum Collection and LACMA Collection. This year she was awarded the Ezra Jack Keat Honor Award for her illustrations for Emile and the Field, written by Kevin Young, the director of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and published by Penguin-Random House in 2022. She is currently working on her first manuscript for a children’s book set to be published in 2024 by Penguin Random House. She is pleased to be sharing a new body of work this summer at Maureen Paley, Morena di Luna, in Hove, UK.