Crosscurrents and Affinities

Crosscurrents and Affinities brings together the work of master and emerging Nigerian artists, examining the varied styles, techniques, and philosophies that have shaped the Nigerian art landscape over the years. From figurative paintings embedded with cultural and fantastical narratives to landscapes animated by interior and exterior scenes, and abstract paintings with multilayered colour palettes, the exhibition stages a cross-generational conversation through seven artists. Across their practices, inherited cosmology and lived precarity, the visible and the invisible, the personal and the political cut across and rub against one another, giving the exhibition its thematic framework.

A dialogue is created between Nike Davies-Okundaye (Mama Nike), Kelechi Chinwendu, and Chigozie Obi. Davies-Okundaye presents a suite of paintings created in collaboration with Tola Wewe, centred on themes of harmony and togetherness. The painting 'In This Together,' created during the global pandemic in 2020, depicts a constellation of otherworldly figures overlapping, punctuated with complex patterns drawn from Yoruba visual culture and Adire motifs. As a fifth-generation Adire artist and weaver, Davies-Okundaye's practice is shaped by the cultural significance of textile traditions passed through generations, often incorporating the visual language of Adire, a Yoruba indigo resist-dye technique, into her paintings to explore narratives of family, womanhood, and Yoruba mythology.

Moving from Yoruba visual culture to the Igbo worldview, Kelechi Chinwendu illustrates a proverb that eulogises women and links the creation of men to women: Nwoke nwuru n'elu nwanyi, ihe wetara ya uwa ewere-kwa ya - a man who dies on top of a woman has only returned to the source of his existence. In this regard, Chinwendu's quadriptych Pathways to the Unknown, comprising 'When Ala Lived Above' and 'How She Came Below,' stages a fantastical narrative of Ala, the Igbo earth goddess and deity, descending from the sky to birth and nurture the earth. In the first scene, Ala appears as a masked figure suspended in the sky, water flowing from a hollow opening at her chest and encircled by a two-headed sacred python rendered as a rainbow, its waters spilling over her. In the second, she becomes Mother Earth, guarding her doorway with a phallic Ofo (staff) standing in as a bolt between her legs. Set against a backdrop of deep indigo, Chinwendu invites audiences into an erotic realm where the female body is presented as a threshold and portal, while evoking the sensual force of women beyond the male gaze. The body of work draws further on the humour and satire of Igbo oral tradition as a metaphor to engage the fatality of life, and the feminine attributes of women as life-givers.

Chigozie Obi builds on the figurative and narrative-storytelling technique employed by Davies-Okundaye and Chinwendu, through a suite of autobiographical and monochromatic works that draw on the artist's personal experience of loss and emotional turmoil. Using elements of worldbuilding, Obi casts herself as the central character in this body of work titled Dreamscape. 'Dreamscape is an exploration of my mind,' Obi says, 'a space where reality and imagination merge to express the feeling of release, rediscovery and reconnection.' The work traces a cycle of transformation, from a state of feeling overwhelmed and restless to recentring oneself; a timestamp for the spectrum of emotions Obi has recently experienced in finding a sense of belonging. This worldbuilding takes shape most directly in the recurring image of a galaxy: 'I remind myself that my dreams are never truly lost and continue to hold meaning,' Obi notes. 'I express this through the image of a galaxy, where the stars symbolise the future I imagine for myself. As I reach toward them, I rediscover a sense of possibility and remember that hope, ambition, creativity and imagination remain within me, as long as I continue to nurture them.'

Crosscurrents and Affinities also engages the seen and unseen forces that shape both exterior and interior landscapes, from public spaces to the built environments people live in. In this context, Abiodun Olaku paints a landfill and an eerie night scene, both punctuated by his signature visual motif of fire and dramatic light effect. Olaku confronts the subject of waste pollution dominating urban cities like Lagos in his Oke Igbala series: a refuse dump site animated with silhouettes of individuals scavenging through a mountain heap of debris, smoke threading up along its ridge under a pale sun crossed by birds. Here, Olaku draws attention to the realities of marginalised individuals and communities confronting the grim conditions of urban neglect. In 'Sounds of the Night,' Olaku turns his gaze to a nocturnal street procession via a moving mass of silhouetted figures, their path marked by scattered flashes of firelight and a handful of lit windows. In doing so, he demonstrates how people activate urban space, gaining or losing power and visibility from the city's infrastructural conditions, while finding solidarity and creating coalitional networks through the possibilities of urban movement and resilience.

In a similar vein, Ayotunde Ojo turns his lens to living spaces, portraying intimate moments of everyday life and mundane activities. In Ojo's paintings, the domestic space becomes a solemn encounter between an individual and the space they inhabit; an artistic inquiry into how, over time, a space absorbs the identity and memory of the person occupying it. Ojo embraces painting as an observational practice, examining the inner lives of his subjects and sitters through how they engage with their living space and the objects it contains. From a sitting room to a household space in between the kitchen and common area, Ojo depicts figures engaged in everyday domestic activities. The first centres on a functional household space with a glimpse of the kitchen, two figures turned from the viewer amid potted plants and one of the figures playing the keyboard; the second shows a living room setting, with a visible figure reclining on a couch and an almost invisible figure sitting upright and carrying an imperceptible dog, amid a clustered table, furniture, and a watchful cat. Across both works, tables, chairs, plants, and other domestic elements create a sense of a lived-in home. The fragmented, layered handling of paint and loosely defined forms further transforms these familiar spaces, allowing the interiors to oscillate between recognisable domestic scenes and more atmospheric, abstracted environments. As a result, the painting becomes less about a single moment and more about layering encounters, memories, and possibilities. Olaku and Ojo, both alumni of Yaba College of Technology, echo Henri Lefebvre's theory of space as a product of social relations, daily life, and economic systems. In Olaku's paintings, space is the product of socio-political forces and unregulated encounters; in Ojo's, space is constructed through tangible and intangible interactions.

Moving beyond the seemingly perceptible, the exhibition places Kainebi Osahenye's multilayered, large-scale paintings in dialogue with Kadara Enyeasi's conceptual, interdisciplinary practice. Two generations apart, both artists share an experimental approach to painting as a mirror of emotional landscapes and the human condition. Osahenye presents three works made between 2018 and 2022, characterised by his distinct visual language of expressive mark-making and a practice that oscillates between concealment and revelation. In 'Dear Buhari,' Osahenye interlaces texts associated with patent-medicine brands: Panadol and Paracetamol, political parties: APC and PDP, conflicts and natural disasters across a web-like network that cuts across the canvas to offer a social commentary on Nigeria's fractured political climate. In 'The Cry Out,' a group of figures are rendered in a zombie-like state, faces marked by anxiety and unrest; and in 'In Her Dream; Go to Sleep, Everything is Alright,' Osahenye offers a quiet contemplation on the human condition; two figures caught in a day-dream, submerged in light and dark shades of green on opposite ends of the canvas.

Kadara Enyeasi presents a large-scale painting, 'Requiem/I come, dancing into your dream,' from his ongoing Parasomnia series. Within the context of Parasomnia, Enyeasi conjures the mysterious visions of a dream state and the disturbances between sleep and wakefulness, drawn from his personal experience of sleep paralysis, likening it to the feelings of displacement and ambiguity experienced by individuals and groups in society. Across a vast red colourfield, three totem-like pillars rise, each stacked with paired, watchful eyes; a moon and a small dark sun hang above, while a solitary masquerade-like figure dances at the painting's edge with arms raised. A line of Igbo text curves along the lower register like an incantation: ka ọ di na be mmadụ, ka ọ di na be mmụọ - as it is in the human realm, so is it in the spirit world. In turn, Enyeasi subverts the notion of parasomnia to illustrate a state of ascension and transfiguration, designing the painting to fill the viewer's field of vision and create an immersive space, evoking feelings of tragedy and ecstasy at once. On a personal note, the painting is a requiem for the artist's father, who recently transitioned to the afterlife.

To transcend the gallery, Crosscurrents and Affinities closes on an Igbo proverb: Ihe kwuru, ihe akwụdebe ya - wherever something stands, something else stands beside it; a manifesto of kindred spirits and a multitude of identities.

Curated by Anthony Ogochukwu Agbapuonwu