Brandon Ndife: Palimpsests | Holtermann Fine Art
Just before lockdown, I wrote about an inspiring Sigmar Polke show I’d been to, which centred on a recreation of his 1960s Kartoffelhaus. Or, “potato house”. It was a neat, gabled, garden-shed like building, with gridded slats of wood for walls, and potatoes nailed to every crossover. The potatoes’ chaotic fecundity, shooting out tentacle-like sprouts, made it seem like they were breaking out from the gridded regularity of their wooden jailhouse.
Five years later, I found an echo of that memorable work in a new exhibition from New York-based contemporary artist Brandon Ndife. Specifically, Young Sprout, pictured below. He uses a mix of found objects, cast in concrete, resin and other materials, in surprising ways. “It’s very fresh, very young, very green,” Ndife says of the work. “Sprouting from this… detritus bag.”
The work is a visual joke. The silver objects are cast bags of crisps, found on the streets of the artist’s home city. The green objects are potatoes, cast in resin, and, as potatoes do, sprouting wildly, anarchically, in all directions. The lifecycle is inverted: potatoes being born. young and green from a plastic packet.
It’s bound and packaged, wall mounted, like a religious relic. Not too much of a critical stretch, given some of Ndife’s titles use biblical references. Even less of a stretch is that the artist’s repurposing of found objects lends them new life, as artworks in a fancy gallery in Mayfair. Or that his layering of resin and concrete itself forms another palimpsest of form and meaning onto them.
The original literary term means, a piece of writing on top of another piece of writing, such that the original is partially obscured. The whole gains new life. Just like the crisp bag and the young green potato.
Brandon Ndife: Palimpsests is at Holtermann Fine Art (London). 02 October 2025 - 29 November 2025