kó is pleased to participate in the eighth edition of Art X Lagos, the art fair in Lagos, Nigeria, taking place November 2-5, 2023 at Federal Palace Hotel, Victoria Island.
This presentation will feature a selection of paintings and ceramic works by Kwadwo A. Asiedu, Bisila Noha, Stephen Price, Deborah Segun and Ozioma Onuzulike.
Kwadwo A. Asiedu (b. 1987, Ghana) is a painter who depicts highly impressionistic landscapes with a visual language of rich, textured layers, and pulsating light, texture, and colour. Asiedu examines the poetic and mysterious qualities of the natural world, channelling the idyllic world untouched by humanity’s corrosive tendencies. This focus, however, is anything but utopic. Asiedu highlights the spiritual and material interdependence between humans and their environment, creating an arresting homage to natural beauty and an urgent plea to preserve what’s left of it. Asiedu was born in Mexico and currently based in Lagos, Nigeria. He holds a Masters degree in Environmental Management from the University of Hertfordshire, England. Recent solo exhibitions include As the World Wilts at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London (2023) and Raised Frequency at The International House IITA, Ibadan (2022). For Art X Lagos 2023, Asiedu will be featured as as selected artist in Art Across Borders, a special project of the fair focusing on emerging voices within the African art community.
Bisila Noha (b.1988, Spain) is a ceramic artist whose work explores overlooked craft traditions, particularly those led by women in the Global South. Her work is influenced by her Spanish and Equatorial Guinean heritage, examining multiple identities and challenging Western views on art and craft. Noha’s ceramics incorporate clay, plaster, and bronze, using processes of throwing, coiling, and craving. Noha’s work positions herself as a feminist activist, calling attention to forgotten women who have shaped the history of pottery. Noha’s work is in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Museum of Scotland. Her work has been featured in the Financial Times and the New York Times. Her work was featured in the group exhibition, Body Vessel Clay, at Two Temple Place in London, alongside the work of historical
African ceramic artists Ladi Kwadli and Magdalene Odundo. Her first solo exhibition, Uprooting, re-rooting: Matter and Construction of the self, was held at Galerie Revel in Bordeaux, France, in 2022. Noha lives and works in London.
Stephen Price (b. 1995, Italy) is a multidisciplinary painter who creates rich humanistic portraits. His paintings are textural yet delicate, layered with a concoction of marks and surfaces. Price uses his imagination along with photographic source material to develop non-existent figures that inhabit their own timeless worlds. Price’s work reflects on his black identity, using materials such as charcoal to celebrate the beauty of blackness, as well as atmospheric colour to ground these nameless and faceless figures in nature. The works’ seductive velvety charcoal areas sit in harmony with more gestural, glossy areas of bright acrylic paint that punctuate and surround his figures. Price was born and raised in Italy after his parents emigrated from Ghana, and later relocated with his family to Birmingham UK. He graduated from the University of Northampton with BA Fine Art Painting and Drawing. In 2021, he was selected for the Royal Society of British Artists Annual Exhibition and was awarded the Society’s Patron’s Prize. Recent solo exhibitions include Reverie at Chili Art Projects, London (2023), and group exhibitions such as Lean on Me and In Situ: Encounters of Place, at kó in Lagos (2022-2023).
Deborah Segun (b. 1994, Nigeria) adopts a deconstructed, reductive, and almost Cubist approach to her paintings, incorporating fragmented and exaggerated shapes, faces, and forms that delineate the female figure in contemplation or repose. Segun’s work exaggerates the feminine silhouette and is perhaps a commentary on the representation of women in an art historical context, from the exaggerated proportions of The Venus of Willendorf or the multi-perspectival views of Picasso. While inspired by her personal experience and her awareness of her mental and physical sense of self, Segun’s choice to focus on the individual becomes a
reference point for a much larger schematic: transitions and phases in life, including self-hate to self-acceptance, are undoubtedly issues that many women – African and otherwise – have experienced. Segun obtained a degree in Fashion Design at the Polimoda Institute of Fashion Design and Marketing in Florence, Italy in 2017. Recent solo exhibitions include Where Is My Mind?, BEERS London (2023); You Keep Going Through It, I’m Just Coming Back From It, Breeder Gallery, Athens, Greece (2022); and The Little Things I Need to Make Me Whole, Ada Gallery, Accra, Ghana (2022). She lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria.
Ozioma Onuzulike (b. 1972, Achi, Enugu State, Nigeria) creates large-scale ceramic
installations that hang like tapestries, formed from thousands of ceramic palm kernel beads, terracotta and copper rings, and natural palm kernel shells. He explores the aesthetic, symbolic and metaphorical nature of the clay-working processes – pounding, crushing, hammering, wedging, grinding, cutting, pinching, punching, perforating, burning, and firing. His recent work is inspired by yam tubers, palm kernel shells and honeycombs which he mass-produces in terracotta and weaves together in often laborious processes. He configures a multiplicity of the
individual units in ways that call attention to pressing socio-political and environmental issues, such as reckless politics, bad governance, imperialism, terrorism and climate change. Adopting the laborious process of firing the materials through multiple kilns, each firing creates unique colors and textures in transforming the clay, oxides, glazes and recycled glass. Recent exhibitions include Recent Works at Marc Straus Gallery in New York, Free The Wind, The Spirit, and The Sun at Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, and forthcoming When Hearts Beat with Lofty Dreams at Afrikaris in Paris. In 2023, kó has presented his work at EXPO Chicago, 1-54 New York, and forthcoming Untitled Art Fair in Miami. In 2021, kó presented his solo exhibition, The Way We Are, in Lagos.