In his ongoing Lagos exhibition, Onyema Offoedu-Okeke distils Nigeria’s turbulent narrative into a visually arresting, thought-provoking meditation that demands both attention and reckoning. Okechukwu Uwaezuoke reports
Perhaps it helps, when encountering Onyema Offoedu-Okeke’s ongoing solo exhibition Time of Redeemer at Liquid Hub Prive — a private club tucked away in the leafy, upmarket enclave of Ikoyi, Lagos — to imagine the nation itself as a theatre of restless allegories. Take his canvases: they stage not merely art, but a full-blown political opera. Horses blaze across boulevards; oligarchs barrel through barricades in gleaming Rolls Royces; women toss sleepless in fields of oppressive whiteness; and a young boy balances a bicycle on his head like Atlas bearing his globe. Elsewhere, Handel’s Messiah drifts through painted air like incense. Curated by Juwon Olusanya, the exhibition is less a collection of paintings than a reckoning — a mirror held up to Nigeria’s postcolonial fugue state, by turns searing and absurd, sardonic and luminous.
Offoedu-Okeke belongs to one of the rarest breeds in Nigerian art — artist, critic, architect, polemicist — the kind of polymath who moves seamlessly between brushstroke and broadside. His career has unfolded as a sequence of well-aimed disruptions: in London, with the Barclays-backed shows of 2003; in Athens, at the so-called “Olympics of Art”; in Miami, with a solo revelation; and in Artists of Nigeria, the monograph that remains the closest thing to scripture in local art circles. But here in Ikoyi, his double act — painter and provocateur — collapses into a single, blunt thesis: that art, not punditry or data dashboards, remains the most incisive instrument for vivisecting a nation’s failures. It’s a grand claim, perhaps — but then, Offoedu-Okeke has never been one to think small.
The viewer is drawn into the grease-streaked world of “Technocracy” (Automobile-Mechanic), a workshop bathed in shafts of light, with a lone mechanic at its center. The scene feels at once ordinary and sanctified — a space where skill becomes devotion and competence, a form of prayer. Offoedu-Okeke seems to suggest that if Nigeria’s leaders approached their duties with the same meticulous care as this engineer with his spanner, the nation’s journey might be less Sisyphean. Light spills into the workshop like revelation, consecrating technical mastery in a country too often enthralled by improvisation.
But soon, the steeds burst onto the scene. In Wind of Change and Fire of Change, they thunder across the canvas with messianic intensity — less gallop than prophecy. They embody economic upheaval in motion, revolution personified, history charging forward whether the powers that be approve or not. Evoking, if faintly, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, these equine apparitions are both electrifying and unnerving — the raw energy of progress when harnessed, the wildfire of revolt when ignored. Offoedu-Okeke’s brushwork is grand and unflinching, his horses not merely subjects but emblems: metaphors, harbingers, avatars of a nation that refuses to stay broken.
If the horses embody flux, the Rolls Royces embody stasis — gleaming monuments to inertia. In “Trial of Oligarchy”, their chrome arrogance bulldozes through protest placards, impervious to the chants of the marginalised, as though silence were the only soundtrack they recognise. “Persistence of Oligarchy” doubles down on the satire: even after the revolution’s dust has settled, the elites remain, lounge-lizard-like, in their Rolls Royces — leather seats unscathed, champagne still chilling, classism as rigid as the glass that separates them from the street. Offoedu-Okeke’s fury here is laced with wit and acid, his brush biting where sermons would falter. Nigeria’s oligarchs, like his painted Rolls, glide through every conflagration with engines purring — history reduced to their private joyride, with not a speed bump in sight.
Sections of the show seethe with social commentary — a scathing indictment of a system long in disarray. In “Stand Dey Looku-Looku”, the passivity of the masses curdles into complicity, a damning portrait of a populace numbed into acquiescence while corruption metastasises unchecked. “Standoffs and Stalemates” orchestrates an operatic deadlock — brass cannons frozen mid-blast, ideologies cancelling each other out in a haze of smoke and mirrors that obscures the deus ex machina of peace that might yet save them all. In “Passengers of Fate”, a rickety vehicle hurtles through history, its passengers lashed together by what the artist — like many Nigerians — views as colonial happenstance, strapped in for the ride whether they like it or not.
Meanwhile, “Locomotive Ideation” (Bicycle Headload) delivers a wry parody of the “japa” dream: a boy balancing precariously on a bicycle, transportation rendered both escape route and high-wire act. Onyema’s fury softens into compassion in “Sleepless” (Women in Whitish Space), where anxiety seeps into women’s bodies like ink — their cultural ornamentation both badge of honour and camouflage. In “Fashionable Scars”, he skewers the chic stoicism of the Nigerian condition, where suffering is worn like couture and hardship is rebranded as resilience — pain as performance art.
And yet, hope flickers — stubborn, perverse, incandescent. “Epiphany in Black” envisions faceless masses bursting forth like fireflies in a darkened forest, a thousand tiny illuminations of defiance. “Free Your Mind” doubles as both warning and rallying cry, urging an electorate to cultivate a healthy suspicion of its redeemers. “Time of Redeemer” itself offers a paradoxical vision of salvation: a horseman arriving not in triumph but in humility — all dust, hooves, and grace. And in “Driver of Dreams”, hope is distilled into the fragile, outstretched hand of a child. Through it all hovers Handel’s refrain — “I Know My Redeemer Lives” — oscillating between faith and delusion, a stubborn refusal to surrender belief in a nation perpetually teetering between collapse and resurrection.
The exhibition shifts gears, traversing a range of symbolic terrains — from the marketplace grids of “Trade Concourse” and “Umbrella Concourse”, where the constitutional veins of commerce pulse with life, to the softly illuminated tomes of “Entrance of the Word Brings Light”. These canvases may speak in quieter tones, yet they hum with resonance, reminding viewers that economy, law, scripture, and introspection all form part of Nigeria’s restless bloodstream. In “A New Day Is Here”, the streets erupt into a cacophony of highlife and juju — a carnivalesque storm that briefly sweeps away the fog of conspiracy and despair. If Nigeria’s national narrative ever needed an epigraph, it might well be this: a theatre of the absurd in perpetual dress rehearsal for salvation.
Offoedu-Okeke’s brushstrokes are indeed both caustic and compassionate — painting potholes as metaphors, Rolls Royces as cartoonish villains, bicycles as parables of precariousness. He dissects a nation gridlocked yet perpetually convinced that the messiah is just around the corner. His canvases seethe with indignation but also shimmer with absurd humour — a tragicomedy that feels unmistakably Nigerian: suffering and smiling, groaning and dancing, despairing and hoping in the same breath.
The redeemer may never arrive, but in this solo exhibition — a collaborative feat by Truview Arts, Frames Gallery, The Romulus Group, and Liquid Hub Prive, running from October 1 to 31 — the theatre of expectation becomes an artwork in itself: a volatile symphony of frailty, fervour, futility, and faith. And if redemption never comes, the spectacle will still shimmer on — heartbreaking yet exquisite. After all, in Nigeria’s grand narrative of endurance, even despair knows how to strike a pose: resilient, unbowed, and lit from within.
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