Rele Gallery Los Angeles is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of IyunOla Sanyaolu titled While We Roam. Built in layers of thickly-applied paint and sweeping strokes, she creates dream-like, frenzied spaces populated by female forms with barely discernible features and sprawling limbs. These figures, shown in stages of visibility offer excavations on lived reality, together with the demands of shifting spaces. Working primarily in oils, Sanyaolu reflects on existence as unfamiliar and strange, demanding a continuous response of adaptation and movement from its inhabitants. In While We Roam, human existence is presented as a realm of unknowable possibilities accessed only by experience and constant negotiations. The figures in the paintings are shown engaged in scenes of lone meditations and togetherness, undeniably present. Here, Sanyaolu emphasises the vitality of relishing and collaborating with the moment as a response to life’s ambiguity. She notes, “when you’re born in a familiar yet unfamiliar space as life, you have no idea what comes next or when it ends, so it’s important to enjoy each moment as it comes”. For the artist, the act of movement becomes a vital way of staying in sync. A way to constantly reposition oneself with the changing demands of the moment. The works in While We Roam present considerations on grasping and adapting to facets of being, probing the self in relation to the communal and drawing from both tangible and intangible elements of the natural and abstract respectively. Here, we are invited to take cognizance of how the unfolding of humanity is constantly charging us to rethink individual values, needs and affiliations.