by Annalisa Giacinti, studio photos by Olivia Noss // Sept. 7, 2026
Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju lets me into her studio with a smile and a buoyant mood. “I know it’s hard but I really hope/you have a good day” reads a cutout quote on her door. She offers me a glass of sparkling water, makes sure her hair looks alright in a vanity mirror and flaunts her perfectly-sized leather couch that’s good for chilling but just a little too small to sleep on, before we sit down at a big work table strewn with two semi-finished canvases, a toolbox, packs and packs of stud earrings, strings of leather, color pencils, spray cans and so on.
I recognize the earrings from two of the seven sculptures Ilupeju has in ‘everybody’, a group exhibition on view at George Kolbe Museum until the end of November. Inspired by British writer Olivia Laing’s book ‘Everybody: A Book about Freedom’, the show is a meditation on both individual and collective body politics and sovereignty, and an opportunity for the artists involved to stand in contrast with Kolbe’s complicated legacy: he was one of Germany’s most celebrated artists of the 20th century and maintained close ties with the Nazi regime, allowing his sculptures to serve their agenda by depicting strong, normative, healthy bodies.
Ilupeju, whose multidisciplinary practice has long intertwined the personal experience of “being in a body”—one universally marked by the emotional demands of trauma, self-image, pain and desire—and the social, political, racial implications of moving it through the world, was invited to participate in ‘everybody’ a year and a half ago. While she had already been working with leather for over two years, used mainly as a painting surface, the time at her disposal gave the artist a chance to research and learn wet molding, a common technique in leathercraft and fashion, consisting of soaking leather in water to make it pliable, and then shaping it by hand or using molds. As the leather dries, it hardens and holds its shape. With the museum’s approval, Kolbe’s sculptures ended up becoming the forms on which Ilupeju let the animal hides dry, before piecing them together “into new conglomerations” and coating them with resin, as a reinforcement. She calls these new layers “second skins” or “ghosts.”
Her work materials are industrial discards and leftovers, secondhand scraps, though she’s conscious of “working on the skin of a living being that once died,” she says seriously. Like in a cotton canvas, and the history of exploitation and forced slavery that precedes it, violence is inherent in leather and so is its resilience: “You can always add moisture back into leather. It’s just a bit more malleable, a bit more flexible, more alive.” The resulting sculptures are considerably flawed and thus distinctly human: they have scars, marks and burns all over; little inscriptions, scribbles and piercings (she gets them from Temu) that recall painful and abject bodily experiences, thereby unsettling the German sculptor’s modernist fantasies of the ideal body. To ‘Male Torso and Pelvis’ (2026), shaped in the form of Kolbe’s ‘Zarathurstras Erhebung IV,’ she added a pair of underwear made of colorful studs, a process of which she enjoys the mindless, almost meditative repetition. “In piercing, there is this element of pain, but also cuteness, a bit of shine and glimmer. The sculptures are quite beautiful, but also quite garish and scary,” she remarks.
‘Pale of Crabs’ (2023), which hangs over the left end of the couch, next to a large print of the same portrait that’s on the cover of her book ‘Earnestly,’ published in 2022, was Ilupeju’s first leather work, and one of her favorites to this day. It’s a backpack that she had since she was 14, bought for $5 at Unique Thrift Store in Silver Spring, Maryland. “I traveled all over, moved to Berlin with it and used it until it eventually fell apart. My mom hated it,” she recounts. “I was gonna throw it away, but I loved the patina of it. There were all these marks that actually made it more beautiful.” She further scratched it with her fingernails, scribbled, leaving more traces on it, unknowingly performing a sort of asemic writing that held abstract images and thoughts. Then seam-ripped it apart and made it into a cross—“a crucifixion of sorts.”
Ilupeju’s practice is multifarious, yet painting, she asserts, is her artistic home. While a performance requires an audience, an installation a lot of administration and larger sculptures extra funds, painting grants her a dimension of privacy in which she finds comfort and resistance at once. “I feel like as much as I paint, there’s always something that I’m trying to figure out.” Writing, too, is an essential part of her work, though more immediate and “explosive” than painstaking. “I make art to have clarity and find meaning. And that sometimes brings me to different corners of ideas and materials,” she explains.
For the upcoming Armory Fair in New York, the artist has made a new body of leather paintings, including four large portraits that continue to address the body and the socialized striving for its optimization, though on a less personal level. They were inspired by make-up contouring and videos of influencers who paint these laborious patterns on their faces to then blend them out into a perfect layer of coverage, with the right shades in the right spots. “I was thinking a lot about the kind of algorithmic pressure that creates these really uncanny outputs. And I love the idea of making a painting of a painting on someone’s face!” Half of the faces depicted belong to real people, the other two are composites that, by being both ambiguous and familiar, remind us of everybody at once.
As in her previous works, these recent portraits challenge the beauty standards that demand not only a perfect body, but also smooth, clear, glowing skin—an expectation she admits having internalized too, to some degree. In doing so, Ilupeju connects everyday skincare routines to broader systems of racialized beauty pressure, where self-care, self-optimization, and self-surveillance collapse into one. As I sit down, I face a small self-portrait in which her forehead and chest are dotted with hydroquinone cream, a medicated product used to lighten dark spots. The painting obliquely references the practice of skin bleaching, still widespread in Nigeria, as well as the colonial structures that continue to enforce racism, colorism and misogyny. “When I went [there] with my dad, I was completely shocked by the levels of skin bleaching that are happening,” which, she observes without moralizing, have worsened in her dad’s 78 years of living. Despite the feigned effort of cosmetic companies to sell platitudes like “You’re beautiful in your own skin,” the global market for skin lightening is a multi-billion-dollar industry profiting off light-skin privilege and the socio-economic advantages attached to it. More troubling still, some of the very companies peddling these self-love catchphrases in the US and the West are the same funnelling potentially carcinogenic skin-lightening products into markets across Africa, Asia and South America.
Scattered around the studio are pieces of older installations and fragments of nascent ideas. Leftover branches, pieces of birch bark, shattered mirrors, the clay breezeblocks she used to build the pavilion in ‘BloodLetter’ (2024). “I have so many ideas. I don’t even know when I’m gonna get it all done!” she utters, relishing the prospect. There’s a discernible amount of softness and deep empathy across all of her work and towards her subjects, a search for a fundamental, ontological beauty that, for the artist, is intrinsic to the very experience of being alive—even in a wounded body, in heartache and death, too. During a residency in Tuscany, Italy, Ilupeju saw a female duck getting brutally attacked and raped by a flock of male ducks, something so atrocious she needed to paint in order to process and keep alive. She also made two large paintings of Simone Biles, hoping to direct some of the athlete’s strength towards herself during a moment of particular pressure, a feeling perceptible in most of the Armory show pieces. She recalls some of the hardships Biles faced in her life, the criticism around her appearance, her marriage, being a victim of Larry Nassar, a former physician who sexually abused hundreds of young gymnasts—“All the shit she has gone through, and then by some miraculous measure, she’s still able to be the best gymnast that ever lived.”
Alongside the exhibition, ‘everybody’ presents a series of live performances that will take place on Sunday, September 13th. Ilupeju’s is called ‘Church of Contrology,’ and draws on the practice of contrology—the discipline developed by Joseph Pilates, before the pilates method became the world’s current fixation, consisting of a system of focused movements to align body and mind—as well as religious and spiritual practices meant to help us cope with life’s uncertainty. In the same place where the contentious ‘Dancer’s Fountain’—commissioned to Kolbe in 1922, featuring a bronze of a white female dancer held up by three crouching Somali men in limestone, and recently sold by his heir for 4 million Euros—once stood, the artist will place a kiddie pool (the same one in which she soaked the leather) and conduct a performance in four parts: a libation ritual, a circuit of classical Pilates exercises, a reading of mourning prose and a small “baptism.” Informed by her own experience of struggling with anxiety, the act is her chance to dissect the very human desire and need for control, and to relinquish the fear that we can’t, in fact, control anything. She slides the deflated kiddie pool out from under the table: “So, this is where the baptism will be happening. Guys, it’s ridiculous!”
Artist Info
Exhibition Info
Georg Kolbe Museum
Group Show: ‘everybody’
Performance Festival: Sunday, Sept. 13; 2–5pm
Exhibition: Aug. 8–Nov. 29, 2026
georg-kolbe-museum.de
Sensburger Allee 25, 14055 Berlin, click here for map
