Nicola Frimpong: Ding-Dong; Frimpong!

Cell Project Space presents the first solo exhibition by British artist Nicola Frimpong. The exhibition stages a cross-section of the artist’s work spanning from 2012 until the present day. A relentless body of paintings executed entirely on A4 paper and primarily produced in gouache, ink and watercolour, Ding-Dong; Frimpong! sets out to revisit narratives in work generated over the past decade that have become increasingly urgent.

The artist works at home, and mostly in private. Intimate in scale, Frimpong’s auto-fictional paintings echo the form of a personal diary depicting dizzyingly elaborate encrypted schemes, drawn from the colonial mishmash of British history, pop and institutional culture. The level of saturation and comic book detail in her drawing defies the demand to absorb the work in full grasp, as all manner of accelerated nightmares, perversions, scatological and libidinous excesses are played out in the artist’s playground of brown and pink bodies, that wilfully undermine normative constructions of self and other.

With keen observation and cutting caricature, what emerges from Frimpong’s exhaustive and multilayered paintings is a responsive voice that navigates the artist’s neurodiversity, gender and race amidst experiences of a stifling cultural and class oppression.

Nicola Frimpong is of Ghanaian descent and born in Epsom where she lives and works. The artist was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries Institute of Contemporary Art, London and Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool in 2012–13, after graduating in 2009 from MFA Wimbledon School of Art. In 2014 she took part in African Diaspora Artists in the 21st Century, curated by writer and academic Paul Goodwin in collaboration with King’s College London’s Department of International Development and the Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva). Frimpong participated in No Soul For Sale (2010) Museum of Everything, Tate Modern, London 2010 and INTERCOURSE 3, (2013) curated by Gregor Muir, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Her work is featured in the survey publication, Stick to the Skin: African American and Black British Art, 1965–2015 by writer, Celeste-Marie Bernier, published by University of California Press in 2019 and Paper, exhibition and catalogue, Saatchi Gallery, London, by writer Ben Street.

For programme or press enquiries please contact Jessie Krish, Gallery Manager, jessie [at] cellprojects.org.