Emmanuel Osahor paints fictional gardenscapes. They are lush and appear slightly wild, but Osahor takes care to remind us they are manmade spaces: a fence, a birdbath, or a plastic chair punctures an otherwise seemingly natural landscape. Osahor’s gardens function as metaphorical spaces, filled with imagined foliage and conceptualised from collaged photographs taken by the artist of gardens he has visited. In his constructed edens, wispy brushstrokes of pinks and powdery greens, blues and dusted purples, are punctuated by small and focused strokes of contrasting richer tones that create pockets of energy. Osahor paints them as mirages rather than as real life spaces: they are constantly just out of reach and appear as though they might melt away before our eyes, as quickly as they seem to have risen from the earth. In Osahor’s works the garden is transformed into a space for respite, a place within which the desire for utopia can be discussed, bringing forward the complexities of hope and failure that are inherent in utopic imagining.
Osahor holds an MFA at the University of Guelph (2021) and a BFA in Art and Design from the University of Alberta (2015). His work has been presented in multiple solo and collective exhibitions, including at the Art Gallery of Alberta; SNAP Gallery, Alberta; the Works International Festival of Art and Design, Alberta; the Art Gallery of Guelph, Ontario; and BAND Gallery, Ontario. In 2018 Osahor received an honourable mention at the 20th RBC Painting Competition and in 2021 he received the Joseph Plaskett postgraduate award in painting. In 2023, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Toronto invited Osahor to create a multimedia exhibition at the museum. Osahor is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at the University of Toronto.