TIFFANY-ANNABELLE - 100 WAYS SHE BLOOMS
@ 67 York Street, Marylebone, W1H 1QB. PRIVATE VIEW: 13 May, 2026, 6 - 8pm
12 - 17 May 2026
Following the success of her UK debut at London Art Fair earlier this year, Ed Cross presents British Nigerian artist Tiffany-Annabelle’s 100 ways she blooms – a spectacular installation of 100 framed mixed-media works on C5 manilla envelopes, at 67 York Street, Marylebone, from May 12 to 17.
The latest iteration of her Women in Bloom series that began in Lagos during the lockdown, explores the relationship between female and floral flourishing. Originally on brown wrapping paper, Tiffany-Annabelle’s new envelope works playfully embody their epistolary medium. Described by the artist as love letters, each opens plural avenues of correspondence – between the work and its viewer, its figure and her environment; the artist, and her own mark-making.
Combining the comic-like quality of graphic silk-screen printing with the spontaneous application of paint and pastel, repetition makes those marks iterative as well as meditative. In 100 Ways She Blooms, the artist’s motifs – inscrutable nude women, surrounded by lush flora – are encountered again and again, as though from slightly shifted vantage points. Reminiscent of stickers, stamps or copy-paste collage, the figures are almost identical, lines and postures (squatting; on tiptoe) recurring. Meanwhile, minute differences underscore the individuality of each – women who, despite their overwhelmingly commonality, retain a resilient and ineffable uniqueness.
While the work is explicitly tied to the artist’s Nigerian heritage – literally, in her choice of flowers native to her Itsekiri homeland – it is equally in conversation with the Western canon and its storied history of depicting the female nude. And although Tiffany-Annabelle’s are unquestionably set apart from that lineage – agents rather than objects, Black rather than white – their nakedness and ambiguous rural settings nonetheless recall countless canonical scenes: biblical Susanna bathing as spied by the elders, or any number of Greek nymphs (Daphne turning into a laurel tree to escape Apollo, for instance).
Such connecting threads are all the more tantalising for the simplicity with which the artist severs them. Untroubled by lecherous gods or elders, the nakedness of Tiffany-Annabelle’s women is neither dangerous nor provocative, neither alluring nor shameful; instead, artist as well as viewer is given space to look with fresh eyes. And as old associations are washed away, the female body emerges as both empowered and empowering. Most profound of all, thanks to the exhibition’s 100-fold repetition, it is granted a new precedent: to simply be.
Broadening her focus from solo women to depict male-female couples for the first time, 100 ways she blooms broaches yet more deceptively radical ground – inverting established depictions of women as supplementary adjuncts to male partners, these latest duos echo the sentiment of Olivia Dean’s hit song, Be the man I need.
Customarily, conventions take years to build up – but with her insistent reiterations, Tiffany-Annabelle accelerates that organic process to her own ends. Establishing new canons for her protagonists to inhabit, sloughing off tired ones in their wake, she grants subjects and viewers alike an uncommon gift: dropping familiar characters into new stories, flashing us snippets, we are finally free to imagine what’s next. How’s that for pushing the envelope?
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