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Grown: The Altering of Innocence and Experience
5 June - 25 July, 2026
William Hine Gallery, London


  Central to the exhibition is an installation comprised of large-scale, suspended collages that combine Onwochei-Garcia’s individual works into immersive structures. Layered compositions revolve around allegorical scenes that draw on literature, myth and folklore. Intertwining historical research with fictional references, the artist constructs complex and unstable tableaux in which fables, falsehoods and competing perspectives overlap. New stories and ideas emerge from well-known tales that offer novel ways of understanding personal experience, memory and identity. 

Drawing upon William Blake’s illustrated poems, the narrative form of the exhibition is anchored through the dual perspectives of Innocence and Experience. Expanded upon through entangled stories of youth and adulthood, Onwochei-Garcia makes reference to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter as a means of exploring matrilineal relationships. Throughout the large-scale collages are representations rooted in Experience, interspersed with corresponding small-scale casein paintings on marble that offer the perspective of Innocence. Displayed in close correlation, episodic sequences appear in dialogue and in contrast with each other, as moments from the stories of the Greek myth’s three generations of female family members, Rhea, Demeter and Persephone, collide and unfold.

Rendered in watercolour and pastel on Japanese washi paper, Onwochei-Garcia’s compositions weave in and out of moments of the story of Persephone’s abduction by Hades and the ensuing grief of her mother Demeter to explore wider dynamics of naivety and wisdom, curiosity, sacrifice and terror. Taking visual cues from Francisco Goya’s Los Caprichos etchings, Onwochei-Garcia’s imagery similarly characterises its figures and their environs with a sense of the dreamlike, both monstrous and fantastical. Each panel is built up of multiple painted and drawn components that are cut and reassembled, replete with iconographic symbols that refer in part to Greek hymn whilst also interspersing them with wider associations from parallel stories that touch on innocence, control and entrapment, including biblical parables and the French folktale of Bluebeard.

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Press
The Guardian - London Gallery Weekend’s 10 must-see shows, Eddy Frankel
Wallpaper* - Ten shows to see at Gallery Weekend 2026, Emi Eleode
The Art Newspaper - London Gallery Weekend 2026: our critics pick their top shows, Louisa Buck & Ben Luke

Projects: ❶ Grown ❷ “Brutus, are you asleep?!” (Roots in the Sky) ❸ Archaeology of the Unfelt ❹ Genius Loci
❺ Nonsense Begins ❻ Quixotic ❼ Puzzling ❽ Dramas de Honor ❾ “¡Silencio!” ❶⓿ A Communion Rite ❶❶ Fly on the Wall ❶❷ Diagram of (the Bacchus) Society
Etcetera.