Bunmi Agusto Awarded the CCA Andratx Artist-in-Residence Prize at Untitled Art Fair Miami Beach

Read Time:2 Minute, 44 Second

Bunmi Agusto has been awarded the CCA Andratx Artist-in-Residence Prize at Untitled Art Fair Miami Beach!

The CCA Andratx Artist-in-Residence Prize returns to Untitled Art, Miami Beach with its Artist-in-Residence Prize, providing an exhibiting artist a unique residency opportunity at its renowned facility in Mallorca, Spain in May 2025. This award includes travel costs and accommodation for the selected artist.

As one of the largest contemporary art centers in the Balearic Islands, CCA Andratx places emphasis on fostering artistic development through its Artist-in-Residence program. Each month, the center hosts four international artists, contributing to a vibrant exchange of ideas and creativity, with over 700 artists from 20 countries having participated in the program over the past 21 years.

Bunmi Agusto’s drawings explore the inhabitants of a surrealistic wonderland in her mind called Within, using this world as an exploratory site for how psychological and cultural theories contribute to the construction of selfhood. Working predominantly with pastel pencils, her mixed-media works on paper depict indigenous hybrids influenced by objects integral to her sense of self and culture. Human family members, friends and passersby are also present in Within as cross-reality migrants who were subsumed into the world after encountering the artist in her waking life.

In Irunoji Visits the Spiritual Realm (2024), we see one of Agusto’s recurring characters Irunoji floating in a boat made out of a large gourd as she floats on the waters of the Spiritual Realm. This body of water exists in a lineage of rivers that are believed to separate the land of the living and the land of the dead across several cosmologies. The concept exists in Yoruba cosmology, Ancient Hebrew cosmology and in other examples such as the River Styx in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome and the River Nile in Egypt. Irunoji is a hybrid character that was born in the artist’s image but with a mutation where braids come out of her eyes. Like the other hybrid characters in Agusto’s work, Irunoji represents a certain fragment of the artist’s persona, specifically her creative mind.

Bunmi Agusto (b. 1999, Nigeria) holds an MFA from Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, an MA

in History of Art & Archaeology from SOAS University, London and a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, for which she received distinctions in all three degrees. She was selected as one of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2023. She was also awarded the Mansfield-Ruddock Prize in 2023, the Clarendon Scholarship in 2022 and the Cass Art Prize in 2019 and 2020. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally and was featured in the Free The Wind, The Spirit and The Sun exhibition curated by Yinka Shonibare CBE RA at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London in 2023. Agusto lives and works in London.

kó selected on Artsy’s “Ten Best Booths” at Untitled Art Fair Miami Beach