Chidy Wayne maps the masculine archetype in Monomyths at Southern Guild, New York

Southern Guild presents Monomyths, a solo exhibition by Spanish-Guinean multidisciplinary artist Chidy Wayne, on view from November 6, 2026 – January 9, 2027, at their New York space. The art exhibition assembles mixed-media paintings by the Barcelona-based artist that explore the human body as a vessel for memory and identity. “Developed in part during Wayne’s time at the GUILD Residency in Cape Town, the exhibition welcomes a deepening of his distinctive visual language, in which the body is progressively distilled through repetition, intuition and line,” Southern Guild notes in the show's description.

The pursuit of truth lies at the centre of the showcase. “I want to find truth in the origins of things,” the contemporary artist says in the press release. Drawing on the recurring figure of his father, the fighter or ‘pugnator’, the artist examines the masculine archetype, considering how identity is shaped by the people and histories that precede us. “Father and son become fractal presences: iterations of a masculine archetype that is continuously dismantled and remade. Here, the fighter is not a symbol of violence or physical prowess, but a vessel through which Wayne examines inheritance, vulnerability and spiritual endurance,” the art gallery explains.

Presented at Monomyths is the Spanish artist’s ongoing Pugnatores series. “Derived from ‘pugna’, the Latin word for fight, Wayne’s ‘pugnator’ gives bodily form to an interior struggle: the ongoing confrontation with questions of identity, purpose and selfhood,” the contemporary art gallery notes. Rather than focusing predominantly on individual bodies, the works bring multiple figures together in compositions that suggest kinship and collective experience. Their expressive, often distorted anatomies move between abstraction and figuration, challenging conventional representations of the body.

“There is a moment in the making of Wayne’s paintings when the image ceases to belong entirely to him. The figure always begins as a sketch; drawn again and again, altered and reduced until something slips free from conscious intention. Wayne sometimes draws with his non-dominant hand or with his eyes closed. Soon, anatomy gives way to intuition, control to surrender, and likeness to something less easily named,” the gallery explains.

The showcase is also informed in part by Wayne’s residency. Working on raw canvas, he incorporates materials including plaster, gesso and sand collected from Cape Town beaches, building textured surfaces that give the paintings a pronounced physical quality. “He imagines these works as if they have been pulled from the walls of Plato’s cave: fragments or artefacts bearing the traces of another age. Surface becomes an active repository, its impressions, fissures and imperfections carrying the residue of labour and time,” the gallery shares.

“Monomyths considers recurrence: the forms, gestures, icons and psychic encounters to which humans repeatedly return. The fighter. The father. The son. The double. The shadow. Bodies confronting one another—or perhaps turning inward to confront themselves. Wayne’s protagonists inhabit this recursive space, suspended somewhere between archetype and individual, inherited image and contemporary man,” Southern Guild states.