Layo Bright: Altar Ego
February 24 – April 11, 2026
de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present Altar Ego, a new exhibition by Nigeria-born, Brooklyn-based artist Layo Bright. The exhibition brings together a group of new sculptures, including the artist’s signature bloom forms, hourglass works, and a series of large glass tiled busts that explore the emotional and psychological terrain of grief, endurance, and renewal. Bright’s practice centers narratives of ancestry, feminism, mass migration, and the African diaspora.
Bright’s bloom works pair cast face molds with individually crafted glass flowers, chosen for their
symbolic connection to migration and cultural narratives. Citing her matrilineal heritage, the Nigerian Ife Heads, West African textiles, and contemporary artists such as Simone Leigh, Kara Walker, Wangechi Mutu, Fred Wilson, and Alison Saar as inspirations, Bright turns to ritual, material transformation, and the fragile architectures of selfhood. These works emerge from a process the artist describes as “a ritual of endurance, rebirth, and grief shedding,” referencing the five stages of grief and the reconstruction of a new identity. Across the exhibition, surfaces shimmer and rupture, presenting sculpture as a site of emotional archaeology.
Through this lens, Bright transforms sculpture into an altar-like space, where personal loss becomes communal reflection and material vulnerability becomes a form of strength. Bright’s practice is distinguished by her hybrid use of glass, wood, and plaster; materials that oscillate between delicacy and resilience. The bloom works appear at once floral and bodily, suspended between growth and collapse. The hourglass forms evoke time as both container and pressure, while the busts, fractured, layered, and luminous, suggest a self continually in the process of becoming. Bright’s work proposes sculpture not as a monument but as a ritual object, an offering shaped by vulnerability and repair.
ABOUT LAYO BRIGHT
Layo Bright was born in 1991 in Lagos, Nigeria, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received an MFA from Parsons School of Design and a law degree from Babcock University. Solo exhibitions include those at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ; Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY; and moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL. Group Exhibitions include those at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE; Museum of Glass, Tacoma, WA; PM/AM Gallery, London, UK; Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, NY; Bode Projects, Berlin, DE; Mike Adenuga Centre, Lagos, Nigeria; Maryland Institute of College of Art, MD; Mana Contemporary, Chicago, IL. Smack Mellon, New York, NY; In 2025, Bright was Artist in Residence at the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY. She is the recipient of awards including the Ron Desmett Award for Imagination in Glass, UrbanGlass Visiting Artist and Designer Fellowship, the International Sculpture Center’s 2018 Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award (2018), and the Beyoncé Formation Finalist Scholarship (2017). She has attended residencies at Urban Glass, New York; Tyler School of Glass, Philadelphia; Art Cake, New York; NXTHVN, New Haven; Triangle, New York; Flux Factory, New York; and The Studios at Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA.
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Melissa Ríos: Tan Solo un Rumor de Fondo
February 24 – April 11, 2026
de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present Tan Solo un Rumor de Fondo (Just a Background Murmur), an exhibition of new paintings by Costa Rica-born, Mexico City-based artist Melissa Ríos, her first solo in Los Angeles. The exhibition brings together new paintings that probe the moment when subjectivity loosens its dependence on external frameworks of recognition, expectation, or gaze.
Ríos’ paintings operate within a non-linear pictorial logic. Time, place, and spatial orientation are deliberately destabilized, producing compositions in which the foreground and background continuously exchange roles. The compositions appear abstract and non-linear, with structural interruptions that propose vision as something provisional. Recurring motifs with birds, butterflies, flowers, and disembodied anatomical elements circulate across the canvases, not as symbols to be decoded but as carriers of affect.
The repetition creates a visual rhythm that resists narrative closure, allowing each painting to register as a field of sensation. The works hold open a space in which meaning flickers, recedes, and re-emerges, akin to the “murmur” invoked in the exhibition’s title. This oscillation produces a form of perceptual breathing room, an interval in which the viewer is compelled to relinquish certainty and remain in ambiguity. The paintings suggest a self no longer defined by explanation or coherence, but by permission to exist, to feel, and to look without resolution.
Ríos describes this by saying, “There is a clear shift from noise to murmur, an inner voice, intuition, a premonition, truth or falsehood; from overflowing fire to inner fire; from the explained self to the perceived self. The works in this exhibition move toward a self that grants itself permission to exist, to feel, and to look.”
Melissa Ríos (b. 1986, Costa Rica) is an artist based in Mexico City whose practice centers on painting and drawing.
Ríos has presented solo exhibitions including In the Margins of What You Call Reality (JO-HS, New York, 2024), Realities in Dialogue / Realidades en diálogo (JO-HS, New York, 2023), and Más allá del mundo que existe (Cuarto 37, Costa Rica, 2021). Her work has been included in international group exhibitions such as Hybrid Vistas (Nika Project Space, Dubai, 2025), Inner Lives (Salon 21, New York, 2025), Anatomías (GARNA Gallery, Madrid, 2025), These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ (Room57 Gallery, New York, 2024, curated by Christine Mack) and The Imaginary Made Real (Berry Campbell Gallery, Curated by Paul Laster, New York).
She was a Semi-Finalist for the Erarta Foundation and ZONAMACO Art Prize (2024) and has participated in artist residencies at the Mack Art Foundation (New York, 2024. Her work has been featured in Vogue, Galerie Magazine, Cultured Magazine, and ONDA MX.
