Marianne Boesky Gallery

509 West 24th Street

Through March 8, 2025

Deploying the visual language of minimalism and geometric abstraction, Serge Alain Nitegeka reappropriates modernism’s formal preoccupations with color, line, and space to examine the lingering effects—both personal and political—of forced migration. Drawing on his own history as a refugee, Nitegeka erects—at times quite literally—barriers, obstacles, and borders both visual and physical for the viewer to traverse. Conjuring unsettling abstracted, obstruction-laden landscapes—in both two dimensions and three—Nitegeka evokes the psychological experience of political displacement and statelessness.

For Configurations in Black, Nitegeka debuts a new suite of paintings and sculptures—which he began working on more than two years ago, in a season of experimentation following a global pandemic. In the resulting paintings on plywood, Nitegeka conjures abstract landscapes defined by loose, organic planes of color—dark gray, bright orange, sunny yellow, vibrant teal. Heavy black lines run across the compositions at various angles while silhouetted figures—borrowed from the artist’s 2012 film Black Subjects—tumble through space, many of them balancing bundles on their backs or shoulders. On canvas, a material Nitegeka returns to for the first time since university, the heavy black lines that appear on plywood—and throughout the artist’s oeuvre—vanish, leaving the figures to float through the landscape with no sense of a horizon line, no sense of which way is up or down, no sense of where they’re coming from or where they’re going. With the painted wood sculptures, Nitegeka evokes the unnamed parcels that the figures in the paintings carry on their backs and shoulders, representing, perhaps the personal effects—and psychological burdens—that migrants carry along their journeys.