In conversation with Betty Ogundipe

“LOVE/FIGHT is my first solo show, so it serves as a manifesto of what I stand for: discipline, beauty, resilience.”

 - Betty Ogundipe

Portrait of Betty Ogundipe, Courtesy of the artist, photography Mariana Pires.

Betty Ogundipe (b. 2001) is a multidisciplinary artist of Nigerian heritage whose work explores resilience, femininity, and the power of love and resistance. Across painting, textile, photography, sculpture, and moving image, she creates symbolic narratives drawn from lived experience. Her debut solo exhibition, LOVE/FIGHT at Tache Gallery, invites viewers into reflective, multi-sensory spaces where familiar symbols are reimagined and intimacy meets strategy. Betty’s practice balances beauty, strength, and vulnerability, offering work that is both deeply personal and universally resonant.

LOVE/FIGHT is currently on display at Tache Gallery until 23 October 2025.

This is your debut solo show, LOVE/FIGHT. For those who might be encountering your work for the first time, how would you introduce yourself and your artistic journey so far? 

I’d say I’m an artist working across forms to explore love, resistance, and femininity as lived experiences. My practice began with drawing and photography but has expanded to incorporate painting and textile. I see each medium as a new language. I’m from West London, and was raised in a culture where survival and creativity coexisted. I’m interested in symbols, and how they can be used as a means of communication. And in how images hold memory and power. LOVE/FIGHT is my first solo show, so it serves as a manifesto of what I stand for: discipline, beauty, resilience. 

Betty Ogundipe, Pair of Hands, Prayer of Hands (2024), Copyright the artist, Courtesy of Tache Gallery.

The title LOVE/FIGHT feels both intimate and combative. What does that duality mean to you, and how does it reflect your own experience of Black womanhood?

I think giving love, and knowing you are deserving of love, takes a lot of strength. In the world of LOVE/FIGHT I am reclaiming militancy as a feminine characteristic, and the battleground as a feminine space. Discipline, resilience, and the composure to retain your beauty under pressure are the realities of womanhood. The duality of love and combat isn’t a burden; it’s a rhythm. It’s what makes survival possible, and it’s what makes joy so powerful when it finally comes.

Much of your work reclaims familiar imagery, like Cheerleader (2023), and reframes it with cultural critique. What draws you to symbols that carry such loaded expectations?

I’m drawn to symbols because they’re shortcuts into memory. The cheerleader is a symbol, defined by our expectations of her, structure, prettiness, optimism, youth, performance. But the most familiar symbols carry histories of violence and shame at the same time. By reclaiming and reframing these figures, I want to expose the mechanics of how femininity is coded, and how women are expected to perform. I want to hold images up to the light so we can question them together. In some ways, I’m less interested in inventing new symbols than in visualising the buried truths of the ones we think we understand.

Betty Ogundipe, LOVE/FIGHT installation views by Sergey Novikov. Courtesy of Tache Gallery.

You work across many mediums from painting and textiles to photography, sculpture and film. Do you see yourself as a storyteller first, with the medium serving the story, or do the materials themselves lead the narrative? 

I don’t see a hierarchy between narrative and material. Sometimes the story comes first, and I find the right form to express it with. Other times, the qualities of the material itself, the vulnerable fraying of yarn, the decisive opacity of paint, leads me to a story. I’m always attentive to tactility, to physical labour, to what it means to make something by hand.

You’ve spoken about documenting adversity as a form of empowerment. Do you see your role as an artist primarily to reflect reality, or to reimagine it? 

I don’t think I can separate reflecting from reimagining. Reality is already distorted by power, so documenting it truthfully means pulling apart what we’ve been told. I see my role as showing what’s real, but also offering a vision of how it could be otherwise. Reimagination isn’t escapism, it’s survival. It’s discussion. If I only reflected back the violence, I’d be reproducing it. By reframing adversity as empowerment, I’m asserting that women, especially Black women, contain the truth of struggle and the possibility of transformation all at once.

Betty Ogundipe, Untitled (2022), Copyright the artist, Courtesy of Tache Gallery.

If someone leaves LOVE/FIGHT and tells a friend about it, what’s the one thing you’d love them to say? 

I’d love for someone to leave and say: “I felt seen.” Or, “I’ve never looked at this in that way before.” The details matter less than the feeling of recognition, or the feeling that something has shifted. Maybe they’ll talk about the discipline in the work, or the emotion, or the symbolism. Ultimately, I want people to leave knowing they saw truth, simplicity and honesty.

Betty Ogundipe, LOVE/FIGHT installation views by Sergey Novikov. Courtesy of Tache Gallery.

The [Quick] #FLODown:

Best life advice?

Reach for the highest, purest forms of love, health and peace you can find, and do not stop reaching until you get there, even if it means losing people along the way. 

A book or text you return to for inspiration?

A Therapeutic Journey by Alain de Botton 

Can’t live without? 

Music, spirituality and love 

Which artist, living or dead, would you most love to have a conversation with? 

Faith Ringgold

What should the art world be more of and less of? 

More truthful and reflective of the times we live in, less ‘freak show’ sensationalism 

Website: buy-betty.com/tachegallery.com

Instagram: @buybetty/@tachegallerylondon