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No Vehicles
UNYIMEABASI UDOH

21 May – 11 July 2026
Alma Pearl, Unit T, Reliance Wharf, London

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Publication  

Limited edition publication featuring a poem by Lola Olufemi and an essay written by the artist

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Events

London Gallery Weekend: 5-7 June

Join us for a book launch and walkthrough with artist Unyimeabasi Udoh on the occasion of their exhibition ‘No Vehicles’. The event features a poetry reading by Dr. Lola Olufemi, who contributed a commissioned poem to the publication.

Date: Sunday, 7 June, 12 – 1pm
(London Gallery Weekend | East End Day)
RSVP

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Selected Press: FLOLondon, The Art Newspaper, Artsy, Elephant Magazine

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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, these prints complement and contextualise the broader concerns of Udoh’s practice and its engagements with the materiality of language, image and sign. The presentation also includes a site-specific intervention titled II, where silver masking tape designates a mapping of the gallery.

A limited-edition publication will accompany the exhibition, featuring a poem by Lola Olufemi alongside an essay by the artist.

Learn about the Artist



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.

In Diversions, the series of prints presented at Alma Pearl, Unyimeabasi Udoh draws on the experience of moving through the city to capture the fleeting semantic textures of everyday urban life. Street fragments, words, and peripheral details become points of attention within a constantly shifting visual environment.

The series belongs to a vein of contemporary visual culture that finds the billboard a site for artistic exploration. These works owe less to pop connotations enacted by those associated with the Nouveau réalisme such as Mimmo Rotella or Raymond Hains and more to the conceptual turn associated with artists akin to Barbara Kruger or Félix González-Torres. More specifically, the series aligns with a broader lineage of “photographs of photographs,” recalling works such as Luigi Ghirri’s Cardboard Landscapes.

For Ghirri, the unnoticed interstices of the urban environment formed a contemporary fresco, comparable to the mural cycles once embedded within churches and civic architecture. These marginal and transient images become documents of their time, preserving the visual atmosphere of everyday life. In a similar way, Udoh’s series moves between the sacred and the everyday. If in other works the artist references religious iconography or pagan female goddesses, here the ordinary urban details of Diversions begin to assume the status of fragmented icons.


Billboards themselves remain emblematic of the modern urban condition, embodying mobility, consumer culture, and the incessant circulation of images through public space. Within Udoh’s practice, however, the found image, the ‘photograph of a photograph’, goes through another layer of transmutation or indeed ‘translation’: from the digital image to an analogue screenprint.




Return to the exhibition page

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Unyimeabasi  Udoh
Alma Pearl Editions 6: No Vehicles
Publisher: Alma Pearl, London, 2026
Text: Unyimeabasi  Udoh; Lola Olufemi
21 x 15 cm, 14 pages + cover
Softcover with accompanying outer sleeve 
Printed in an edition of 250 copies

Published on the occasion of No Vehicles, Unyimeabasi Udoh's first exhibition at Alma Pearl, this limited-edition publication features a commissioned poem by Lola Olufemi and an essay by the artist. 

Alma Pearl Editions is a platform for contextual exploration, offering insight into artists’ practices through essays, conversations, and visual documentation. Issues are released on an ad hoc basis.

*Please select your delivery zone for the applicable fee which includes shipping costs. UK VAT calculated at checkout. Import duties and taxes for outside the UK included in the listed price.