Unyimeabasi Udoh: No Vehicles
Forthcoming exhibition
Overview
Unyimeabasi Udoh, No Vehicles (Siren), 2026
Alma Pearl is pleased to announce No Vehicles, a solo exhibition of new work by London–based Nigerian American artist Unyimeabasi Udoh (b. 1996, USA). Udoh is an artist working at the forefront of sign and symbol in contemporary art alongside their attendant materialities across a range of media. This exhibition brings together a series of wall-based sculptures fabricated from materials commonly associated with road infrastructure such as aluminium and retroreflective glass with a selection of screenprints based on photographs of advertising billboards and hoardings captured in London across the past year. Titled Diversions, this group of prints complements and contextualises the broader concerns of Udoh’s practice and its engagements with the materiality of language, image and sign.
The meticulously executed wall-based signs, made using cold wax medium, pigment and retroreflective glass beads, are activated by light and perception. As viewers move through the space, their surfaces shift in appearance—alternately luminous, opaque, or seemingly void. Subtle gradations of tone destabilise the surface, producing a flickering effect that resists a fixed reading, thus revealing the polysemy of the seemingly universal fluency of the pictographic image. With their low-contrast, waxen surfaces, these signs become estranged from their functional origins and instead operate as propositions about the absence of direction, the ordering of space, and ultimately the politics of visibility.
The exhibition’s title, No Vehicles, refers to the language of prohibition embedded within road signage. The main group of circular works appear as signs without visible text. They are not, however, incomplete: the empty circle is the official symbol for ‘no vehicles’ as regulated by the UK’s Department for Transport. The instruction thus enters the realm of the absurd: how might we be expected to recognise the absence of a symbol to signify a prohibition of presence? Devoid of explicit instruction, the signs occupy a space of suspended meaning—objects that signal without declaring.
Language remains present but displaced. This is contained within the titles of the works rather than inscribed on their surfaces:
No Vehicles (O Petrol)
No Vehicles (Milkmaid)
No Vehicles (Sister)
No Vehicles (Siren)
No Vehicles (Maenad)
The subtitles introduce narrative, intimacy, and metaphor without materially manifesting text. The signifier exists, but it is only ever deferred.
Udoh’s visual vocabulary resonates with the perceptual and materially attuned traditions of Post-Minimalism and Light and Space—these practices offer a context in which Udoh employs a minimal, stripped-back aesthetic to foreground the phenomenological experience of looking. However, the lens of materiality and the formal quality of the presentation is only one of the frameworks from which to approach Udoh’s work. The artist brings a subjective and decisively lyrical relationship to language and abstraction, which is charged with references to the celestial and a remote, abstracted feminine. The circular form of the No Vehicles signs alludes to the full moon and a black hole (both references the artist has regularly adopted in previous work) and their titles refer to a constellation of female figures in an apostrophe that invokes petroleum as a kind of goddess.
Contemplazione—a shift to Italian that relates to the artist’s experience of linguistic dislocation and accommodation to new languages and systems of signs—stands apart within the presentation as the only work from the series that explicitly features text on its surface. Drawing from a personal moment of encountering the immensity of water and based off of an actual sign seen in the suburbs of Messina in Sicily, the work compresses vastness into minimal form.
Throughout No Vehicles, void and invisibility are not absences but active conditions. Indeed, Udoh’s engagement with the materials of urban infrastructure presents a tension between the poetic and the regulatory, the contemplative and the directive.
Unyimeabasi Udoh (b. 1996, USA) lives and works in London. Their work across media—print, drawing, sculpture, and installation—centers on legibility, the void, and the construction of meaning. Recent solo exhibitions include Flood, Piccalilli, London (2024); Withdrawing, Kip, London (2024); A Gain at Night Café, London (2023); and Ave at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2023). Recent group exhibitions include Towards an Affinity of Hammers, CALM – Centre d’Art La Meute, Lausanne (2025–2026); Maison CLEARING, C L E A R I N G, Basel (2025); Veil & Void, Xxijra Hii, London (2025); Manifold, Alára, Lagos (2024); Handful of Dust, Palmer Gallery, London (2025); Whipped, Under the Spell, London (2025); Itinéraires Fantômes, CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux; Great Expectations, General Assembly, London (2023); and Bitch Magic, Alma Pearl, London (2023).
