Art X Lagos
kó is pleased to participate in the tenth edition of Art X Lagos, marking the gallery’s tenth year at the fair. This cross-generational presentation reflects on how cultural memory, personal experience, and material knowledge are carried forward and reinterpreted across time. The presentation features works by Ben Enwonwu, Erhabor Emokpae, Uzo Egonu, and Ben Osaghae in dialogue with contemporary practices by Modupeola Fadugba, Ayotunde Ojo, Ozioma Onuzulike, Motunrayo Akinola, Diana Ejaita, and Araba Opoku.
Across the presentation, several shared threads emerge. Narrative and cultural symbolism link the work of Ben Enwonwu and Modupeola Fadugba, each turning to collective celebration and tradition as a way of articulating belonging and continuity. Enwonwu’s depictions of dancers emerged from his engagement with cultural identity during the post-independence period, while Fadugba’s recent works consider the Ojude Oba Festival as a living expression of Yoruba collective memory and pride.
Questions of interiority and the emotional conditions of everyday life connect Ben Osaghae and Ayotunde Ojo, who each explore how uncertainty, longing, and fear shape visual experience. Osaghae’s psychologically charged scenes of suspended figures resonate with Ojo’s quiet domestic spaces, where thought and silence shape the composition as much as action.
Material labor and the transmission of craft knowledge tie Erhabor Emokpae, Ozioma Onuzulike, and Motunrayo Akinola, whose works consider how making is itself a form of cultural affirmation. Emokpae’s carved hardwood figures draw on the heritage of the Benin Kingdom while moving toward abstraction. Onuzulike’s ceramic palm kernel tapestries explore the aesthetic and symbolic nature of clay-working. Akinola’s charcoal-based performance works show how forms hold together, come apart, and re-form in motion.
Finally, graphic language and geometric abstraction form a dialogue between Uzo Egonu, Diana Ejaita, and Araba Opoku, who each distill image-making into patterns, silhouettes, and atmospheric surfaces that hold cultural and emotional meaning. Egonu’s fractured spatial systems and rhythmic patterning echo in Ejaita’s bold silhouettes and symbolic layering, while Opoku extends these concerns into atmospheric abstraction informed by psychology and sensory experience.
Motunrayo Akinola (b. 1992, London, UK) explores timelines of access, comfort and a sense of belonging, using historical imagery and text to contextualise narratives of today. Akinola's charcoal works on linen feature abstract compositions that balance areas of blackness with negative space. These abstractions, while elusive at first, reveal cohesive patterns of interaction, balance, and disintegration. Inspired by traditions of teeth blackening found in parts of Southeast Asia, Akinola uses this imagery to challenge notions of beauty and address cultural gaps. By invoking the practice of teeth blackening, he underscores shifting generational attitudes and celebrates a more self-affirming embrace of heritage. These works are part of his Movement series, which are informed by performances in white walled galleries or studio spaces.
Uzo Egonu (1931-1996) is widely regarded as one of the most influential modernists of the African diaspora. Born in Onitsha, he moved to the United Kingdom in 1945 at the age of fourteen and studied at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. Remaining in London for most of his life, Egonu developed a practice that combined elements of Igbo visual culture, particularly textile patterning, architectural geometry, and carved figurative forms, with the fractured planes and spatial experimentation of European modernism. Throughout his career, Egonu produced paintings, drawings, and a body of linocuts and prints, many of which explore themes of memory, migration, and the reconstruction of cultural identity abroad. Figures, landscapes, and symbolic motifs are embedded within latticed networks of pattern.
Diana Ejaita (b. 1985, Cremona, Italy) explores the layered nature of human experience, spirituality, and cultural memory. Her works embody the idea of assembled histories, where past and present converge through forms, symbols, and negative space. Drawing from West African literature and textile traditions, she develops a visual language that blends abstraction with storytelling. Her compositions present fluid silhouettes that emerge from dense layers, with recurring motifs resembling bodies, natural elements, and ritual objects such as horns, shells, plants, crowns, and natural fibers. Working through a process of layering and assemblage, she creates what she refers to as “nature morte” or “visual prayers” that imagine new forms of experience and exchange.
Erhabor Emokpae (1934–1984) was a Nigerian modernist whose practice spanned sculpture, painting, murals, and graphic design. Born in Benin City, Edo State, he trained at the Government Trade Center, Lagos (now Yaba College of Technology) between 1951–1953. His bronze replica of the Ivory Mask of Queen Idia was selected as the official emblem of FESTAC ’77. In 1974, he was commissioned to create sculptural and decorative works for the National Arts Theatre, Lagos. Emokpae’s wooden sculptures from this period are typically carved from a single block of dense hardwood, often ebony. The figures are elongated in proportion, with simplified heads and minimal anatomical detail, emphasizing verticality and overall form. Surfaces are marked with repeated chisel incisions, creating a rhythmic texture that follows the contours of the figure. This approach reflects Emokpae’s engagement with Benin carving traditions, while adopting a streamlined, modernist reduction of form that places focus on silhouette, structure, and the presence of the figure in space.
Ben Enwonwu (1917–1994) worked across sculpture and painting during the colonial, independence, and post-independence periods, forming a modernist language that engaged Nigerian cultural identity within a global artistic context. Female Form II (undated) is carved from ebony with elongated proportions. simplified facial features, and smoothed surfaces that are characteristic of his minimalist sculptural approach. In Dance of the River (YOWUBA) (1980), three figures are depicted in rhythmic motion. The work belongs to Enwonwu’s extended series on African dance, exploring the human figure in motion and communal performance.
Modupeola Fadugba (b. 1985) examines the cultural significance of the Ojude Oba Festival, a celebration of Yoruba heritage that reflects deep communal ties and pride. The festival honors the powerful bond between the Monarch and his people in Ijebuland, symbolizing identity, unity, and collective purpose. Her recent works focus on the everyday labor and intimate acts of preparation that underlie the festival, foregrounding the skilled hands and local craft traditions behind its pageantry.
Ayotunde Ojo (b. 1995, Lagos, Nigeria) focuses on everyday moments and the quiet dynamics of human relationships and interior life. Drawing from memory and the atmosphere of familiar domestic spaces, his paintings reflect how thought, distance, and connection take shape in ordinary settings. Ojo works with charcoal, oil, and acrylic, building soft, layered surfaces in a muted palette. He describes the works as self-portraits of experience, informed by encounters, environments, and the traces they leave over time. In Just Resting My Eyes (2025), a reclining figure momentarily surrenders to rest amid the quiet fatigue of a workday afternoon. The title evokes that delicate space between alertness and sleep, where the mind begins to wander. In The Conversation (2025), two figures share a quiet, charged moment across a domestic space. Between them, and unspoken tension lingers. The looseness of the paint, and the partial rendering of the dog , and the drifting edges of furniture all suggest the fragility of communication, the way words hang in the air before settling.
Ozioma Onuzulike (b. 1972, Nigeria) creates large-scale ceramic works, resembling tapestries, that are meticulously crafted from thousands of ceramic palm kernel beads and natural palm kernel shells. He explores the aesthetic and symbolic nature of clay-working, adopting a laborious process to achieve unique colors and textures in the clay, oxides, and glazes. Each ceramic undergoes bisque-firing and is dipped into ash glazes before being adorned with recycled glass. The pieces are woven with copper wire and allude to the West African textile traditions of Akwete, Aso Oke, and Kente. These beads mimic the visual lightness of precious stones or ivories and also carry a tangible weight, much like Africa’s woven prestige textiles, dense with meaning, history, and identity.
Araba Opoku (b. 1998, Ghana) creates abstract paintings through a fluid process that interlaces winding brushstrokes with geometric motifs, depicting escapist landscapes. Her practice explores the multiplicity of ecologies, those rooted in the body and psyche, as well as the natural, spiritual, and mystical realms. Through her layered compositions, Opoku evokes the entanglement of these tangible and intangible worlds, evoking the interconnectedness of existence. Vivid psychedelic hues ripple across the surface in undulating patterns and textures, suggesting organic and symbolic resonance. The canvas is encased in a warped, sculptural frame that mirror’s the painting’s internal fluidity, echoing her expansive approach to form. Drawing from material culture, Opoku considers how patterns, symbols, and sensory experiences can act as portals into concealed layers of meaning.
Ben Osaghae (1962–2017) was a central figure of the Nigerian post-modern figurative movement, celebrated for paintings that merge psychological depth with an abstract and gestural sensibility. Osaghae developed a distinctive visual language in which figures appear suspended and spatially disengaged, using rapid brushstrokes to suggest ambiguous outlines and narratives. In Green Light (2001), a lone figure shifts across a luminous ground, surrounded by floating forms. The composition suggests a moment of transition or threshold as a psychological state of passage. The painting distills Osaghae’s enduring interest in how internal experience can be rendered through color, atmosphere, and the tension between abstraction and the human form.
