Art X Lagos 2026

kó is pleased to participate in Art X Lagos 2026 with a multigenerational presentation of artists across Nigerian modernism and contemporary practice. This presentation includes pioneering modernists including Ben Enwonwu, Obiora Udechukwu, and Tayo Adenaike, whose work enter dialogue with contemporary artists including Marcia Kure, Ozioma Onuzulike, Ngozi-Omeje Ezema, Ruth Ige, Abdus Salaam, Ayotunde Ojo, and Diana Ejaita.

This presentation includes two significant examples of painting and sculpture by Ben Enwonwu (1917–1994, Nigeria), a pioneer of African modernism whose work often explored the human figure and landscape. Working across Nigeria’s colonial and post-independence periods, Enwonwu developed a distinctive modernist language that drew upon indigenous aesthetic traditions while articulating the country’s emerging national identity. Ben Enwonwu’s Untitled (Palm Grove) (1964) depicts a lush tropical landscape through rhythmic composition and meticulous brushwork that captures the dense foliage of a palm grove. At the centre of the painting, a woman carrying a vessel emerges as the central narrative, reflecting Enwonwu’s interest in depicting everyday life and the dignity of women’s labour. Enwonwu adopts the palm grove as a symbolic motif, evoking memory and the connection of place. Ben Enwonwu’s Torso of a Girl (c. 1986) depicts a young Fulani woman through elongated proportions, curving lines, and silhouetted form. The bronze sculpture reflects Enwonwu’s exploration of beauty and cultural identity, synthesising African aesthetic traditions with modernist experimentation in form.

This presentation features several modern and contemporary artists associated with Nigeria's Nsukka School, at the Department of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Obiora Udechukwu (b. 1946, Nigeria) was a pioneering figure of the Nsukka School who studied under Uche Okeke and taught at the university for two decades. Grounded in the philosophy of Natural Synthesis, which encouraged artists to engage indigenous artistic traditions as a foundation for contemporary practice, the Nsukka School found particular inspiration in uli, the Igbo tradition of mural and body painting known for its fluid lines, organic forms, and expressive use of space. Tayo Adenaike (b. 1954, Nigeria), a student of Obiora Udechukwu at Nsukka who received his B.A. in Fine Art in 1979 and his Masters in Fine Art in 1982, extends the school’s modernist traditions through watercolour paintings incorporating uli and nsibidi motifs.

Marcia Kure (b. 1970, Kano, Nigeria) repositions drawing as a system of inscription through which materials are condensed, rerouted, and made to bear weight. She engages natural and synthetic materials as active agents within systems of circulation and material exchange. Her practice approaches substrate not as passive surface but as infrastructure, a site where histories accumulate and spatial relations are pressurized and reorganized. Kure’s Network V, an installation including large-scale drawing and sculpture, was featured in the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia by Koyo Kouoh in 2026. 

Ozioma Onuzulike (b. 1972, Achi, 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.

Ngozi-Omeje Ezema (b. 1979, Nsukka, Nigeria) creates sculptural installations composed of hundreds of suspended terracotta fragments that coalesce into amorphous vessel-like forms. Ezema’s practice reconsiders inherited traditions of pottery, transforming the vessel from an object historically tied to domestic and utilitarian function into a site symbolizing memory, embodiment, and human experience. Ezema works with fire clay and coal-shell excavated from the Iva Valley coal mines in Enugu, incorporating materials embedded with the industrial and environmental histories of southeastern Nigeria. Individual ceramic elements are connected with translucent fishing wire and suspended as free-floating or wall-mounted installations that appear at once fragile and monumental. Drawing on the forms of vessels, leaves, and the material presence of the earth itself, Ezema explores the body as a physical and symbolic container. Informed by biblical conceptions of human beings as vessels, Ezema extends these metaphors as symbols of spiritual containment.

This presentation also brings together contemporary artists working between Nigeria, South Africa, New Zealand, and Germany, exploring new approaches to figuration and the relationship between objects and space.

Ruth Ige (b. 1993, Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Nigeria) employs a rich palette of indigo and blue to depict enigmatic female figures suspended between portraiture and imagined landscapes, drawing upon African cultural traditions and ideas of identity, spirituality, and protection. Her paintings construct mythical spaces where silhouetted figures, predominantly women, inhabit worlds that feel at once earthly and otherworldly. Ruth Ige's solo exhibition at kó, Woven realms, is currently on view at the gallery until November 21, 2026. The exhibition was recently reviewed in Artforum (October 2026). 

Abdus Salaam (b. 1989, Cape Town, South Africa) creates abstract sculptures inspired by natural forms, exploring the relationship between materiality, spirituality, and the surrounding environment. His work incorporates a cultural fusion of Western, Eastern, and African sensibilities, meditating on time and the ethereal relationship between matter and meaning. Salaam spent his formative years on a remote South African farm without electricity, where he painted and sculpted with earth, stone, and clay from the waterhole. Rooted in his poetry and his spiritual practice, his art is both prayer and exploration, seeking unity, surrender, joy, and transcendence. In three new sculptures, Salaam worked with African Turqoise, Namibian Marble, Petrified Wood (Turkey), Quartz, and Fluorite, hand-carving the sculptures with material juxtaposition that speak to narratives of love, loss, marriage, and parenthood.

Ayotunde Ojo (b. 1995, Lagos, Nigeria) creates paintings that depict intimate domestic interiors and solitary figures, using layered perspectives, colour, and light to evoke memory, contemplation, and the passage of time. 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.

Diana Ejaita (b. 1985, Cremona, Italy) reimagines the tradition of still life through sets of small-scale paintings, bringing together vessels, silhouettes, plants, and symbolic objects in layered compositions that draw upon West African storytelling and textile traditions. Central to Ejaita's practice is the tradition of nature morte, or still life, reimagined through what she describes as "visual prayers." Vessels and silhouettes overlap and flow across the surface, shifting between the recognizable and the abstract. Many of these elements appear sculptural, suggestive of objects of devotion. Diana is best known as an illustrator who has been featured on eleven covers of The New Yorker since 2020. kó featured a solo presentation of Diana Ejaita at The Armory Show, New York, in September 2026.