SOFT HORIZONS – New Visions of the African Landscape

OOA Gallery presents SOFT HORIZONS – New Visions of the African Landscape, a summer group exhibition bringing together Megan Gabrielle Harris, Olivia Mae Pendergast, and Miska Mohmmed to explore landscape as a space of memory, imagination, contemplation, and emotional experience in contemporary African and diasporic art.

About the Exhibition

SOFT HORIZONS – New Visions of the African Landscape brings together three artists whose works expand the meaning of landscape beyond the representation of place. Presented by OOA Gallery during the summer season in Sitges, the exhibition considers landscape not as scenery or geography alone, but as a site of memory, projection, interiority, and transformation.

Across luminous horizons, quiet fields, imagined gardens, and fluid terrains, the works gathered in SOFT HORIZONS move between observation and reverie, between the physical world and the inner landscapes carried by the artists themselves. Here, place is never neutral: it is shaped by recollection, atmosphere, movement, belonging, and emotional experience.

The exhibition proposes a softer and more contemplative vision of the African landscape. Rather than presenting land as a fixed territory or distant view, Harris, Pendergast, and Mohmmed approach landscape as a living and unstable field – one in which memory, imagination, and symbolic presence continually reshape what is seen.

Megan Gabrielle Harris paints landscapes suspended between observation and reverie. Her Afro-surrealist practice often places figures within dreamlike natural environments, where softness, beauty, and calm operate as forms of resistance. In works such as Astral, the viewer looks through parted curtains toward an expansive outdoor scene where a solitary figure quietly crosses an illuminated field. The curtains act as thresholds between interior and exterior worlds, while the landscape itself becomes less a fixed location than a space of introspection, restoration, and self-possession.

Olivia Mae Pendergast approaches landscape through remarkable restraint. Her paintings are marked by stillness, delicacy, and a deep sensitivity to atmosphere. Often featuring iconic African trees set against expansive fields of simplified colour, her works reduce the scene to essential forms, allowing each tree to assume an almost archetypal presence. These are not botanical studies or descriptions of specific locations, but meditative images of solitude, permanence, silence, and duration.

Miska Mohmmed approaches landscape through memory, displacement, and transformation. Born in Sudan and shaped by movement between Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Kenya, she constructs vibrant mindscapes that merge remembered places with intuitive invention. Rivers, deserts, skies, vegetation, and architectural traces dissolve into fields of colour and rhythm. In her work, landscape becomes speculative rather than descriptive – an invented ecosystem where emotional, ecological, and symbolic worlds coexist.

Although their visual languages differ, the three artists share a refusal to treat landscape as passive background. For Harris, landscape becomes inward reflection and a place of self-possession. For Pendergast, it becomes distilled memory and contemplative stillness. For Mohmmed, it becomes movement, transformation, and speculative imagination.

Together, their works suggest a broader shift within contemporary African painting: a movement away from landscape as documentation, and toward landscape as psychological, symbolic, and emotional territory. The land is not simply represented; it is remembered, imagined, inhabited, and transformed.

In this context, the title SOFT HORIZONS evokes more than visual distance. It suggests thresholds, transitions, and states of perception – places where the visible world opens onto something less fixed, more intimate, and more dreamlike. Through surreal atmospheres, symbolic forms, and imagined terrains, SOFT HORIZONS reveals landscape as an active presence: a field of memory, emotion, and possibility.

Further Reading

The themes explored in SOFT HORIZONS resonate with broader conversations around diaspora, memory, movement, and transnational identity in contemporary African art.

For further reflection, readers may explore OOA Gallery’s insight: Diaspora, Identity and Transnational Narratives in Contemporary African Art .

Exhibition Details

• Dates: July 25 – August 30, 2026
• Location: OOA Gallery, Sitges (near Barcelona), Spain
• Artists: Megan Gabrielle Harris, Olivia Mae Pendergast, Miska Mohmmed
• Inquiries: Prices & availability on request