Luke Agada: When the Center Holds at Sean Kelly

Nigerian-born painter Luke Agada has his first solo exhibition with Sean Kelly in New York, titled When the Center Holds and running through October 31, 2026. The show brings together new paintings and drawings that ask how meaning and belonging persist when history and culture are shifting around us.

Agada was born in Lagos in 1992 and earned his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023. He lives and works in Chicago. His work has appeared in group exhibitions at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, the Hive Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, and the African Artists' Foundation in Lagos. Among his honors are Newcity's Breakout Artist in 2024 and the James Nelson Raymond Fellowship in 2023. He took part in residencies at MASS MoCA in 2023 and at Dragon Hill Residence in Cannes in 2025.

His paintings look at contemporary identity through globalization, migration, and postcolonial thought. Incorporeal figures, fragmented architectures, and biomorphic forms drift through dreamlike landscapes that are not tied to any one geography. Agada says he starts from recognizable elements and lets them stretch, metamorphose, and overlap until the meaning grows more complex, treating paint itself as a collaborator.

The title plays on a line from W. B. Yeats's poem The Second Coming, "the center will not hold." Agada reads the idea in a more hopeful light. For him the center is not a fixed seat of authority but a relational space that is negotiated over time, where memory resists erasure, identity survives translation, and belonging continues despite displacement. Bodies dissolve into fluid architecture, and forms merge and separate, so that suspension reads as a condition of becoming rather than paralysis.

Works listed from the show include the oil paintings Sing Over Me (2026, 72 x 60 inches), the paired Manoah I and Manoah II (each 36 x 60 inches), and Of Tempest, Of Dreams (72 x 84 inches), alongside the charcoal-on-cotton-canvas drawing Synapses No. 40. The gallery is at 475 Tenth Avenue in Hell's Kitchen and is open Tuesday to Friday, 11am to 6pm, and Saturday, 10am to 6pm.