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Autonomous Women Behind Eyeglasses: Ndidi Emefiele and “Behind the Glass” at No.9 Cork Street

Autonomous Women Behind Eyeglasses: Ndidi Emefiele and “Behind the Glass” at No.9 Cork Street

Looking into a woman’s eyes does not mean trespassing into her world; sometimes a massive spectacle lens in front of those eyes turns into a protective armor reflecting the gaze back outward. Presented by gallery rosenfeld at Frieze’s space in Mayfair, No.9 Cork Street, Nigerian-British artist Ndidi Emefiele’s exhibition “Behind the Glass” offers a retrospective selection covering more than a decade of the artist’s production process. Curated by Péjú Oshin, the exhibition welcomes visitors between September 11 and 26, 2026.

Extending from Emefiele’s early canvases produced in Nigeria to today’s large-scale mixed media compositions, the selection brings into focus the massive spectacle motif, which is the most distinctive signature of her practice. Formed with fabric pieces fixed by stitching onto canvas rather than glued, tailor remnants, old CDs and DVDs, buttons, and found objects, these eyeglasses establish a distant boundary between the depicted women and the outside world seeking to label them. Confronting the viewer with their own image through its reflective surface or shutting the gaze completely inward, these spectacle lenses transform into the symbol of an autonomous female identity taking ownership of her own existence, far from fragility.

Housing works like Search Party (2018), where painting, textiles, and found materials are layered, the exhibition makes visible the material intuition the artist carried from her early periods that began with limited studio facilities to the present. This evolution in Emefiele’s studio practice evolves into an independent visual language that removes the female body from being a passive object of viewing and renders it the protector of its own story.

Spreading across the halls of No.9 Cork Street, this retrospective invites the viewer not merely to a single artist’s ten-year career trajectory, but to an intimate dialogue built upon the boundaries of gaze and visibility.