Chidy Wayne: Monomyths — Chidy Wayne

Monomyths, Chidy Wayne’s first major solo with Southern Guild, brings together a new body of mixed media paintings. Opening at the gallery’s Tribeca space on November 6, 2026, the works in Monomyths were 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. 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. “I want to find truth in the origins of things,” he says. Through this iterative process, Wayne seeks to free the image from the particulars of reality, moving towards an essential form that feels at once newly made and ancient. “Maybe when I am old,” he says, “I will be just a line. Just a single line.” This pursuit of truth lies at the centre of Monomyths . At the origin of Wayne’s enquiry is his father, whose image exists behind and within the figures that populate his canvases, refracted through Wayne’s own likeness and the figure of the ‘pugnator’ – the fighter. 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.