Segun Ade-Martins
This October, Tate Modern reintroduces Nigerian Modernism to the world. The exhibition secures Nigeria’s rightful place in the global history of modernism—alongside Paris, London, and New York. Spanning five decades from the 1940s onward, this landmark show features 250 works by 50 artists, tracing a vibrant, often-overlooked narrative of creativity, resilience, and reinvention.
For too long, the story of modern art has been told through a Eurocentric lens. This exhibition decisively challenges that notion, presenting compelling evidence that Nigerian modernism was every bit as radical, inventive, and self-aware as its Western counterparts. It grew from a defiant synthesis of inherited traditions and global contemporary thought, producing a visual language at once local and universal.
Curated by Osei Bonsu, with Bilal Akkouche as assistant curator, the show offers a richly layered entry into art history—one that expands the canon by revealing a dynamic web of artistic exchange and intellectual ferment.
Modernism, broadly defined, was a global movement built on ideals of progress and experimentation from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth. It encompassed styles such as Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, and Dadaism. Yet, as this exhibition shows, modernism was never a purely European enterprise—it was a global conversation.
Just as artists across the world responded to political upheavals such as the World Wars, Nigerian artists forged their own modernisms amid colonial rule, independence, and diaspora. Their works confront imposed hierarchies of value, transforming borrowed forms into powerful assertions of cultural sovereignty.
The exhibition unfolds across nine rooms, each conceived as a time capsule of themes and ideas. Together, they reveal the multi-dimensionality of Nigeria itself—an amalgam of cultures, languages, and histories whose artistic output mirrors the nation’s own complex evolution.
The narrative opens with Aina Onabolu and Akinola Lasekan, pioneers who used European techniques to celebrate local subjects. Onabolu’s refined portraiture dignified Lagos society, while Lasekan reimagined Yoruba history and legend, reclaiming narrative agency from colonial representation.
The second gallery focuses on Ben Enwonwu, known primarily as a sculptor but equally prolific as a painter. His depictions of masquerade dancers and cultural icons are shown alongside his dialogues with sculptor Ben Epstein—notably, wooden figures reading newspapers that spread like wings, suggesting the flight of ideas.
The third room is devoted to the legendary potter Ladi Kwali, whose practice fused traditional Gwari techniques with European studio methods learned under Michael Cardew. Her vessels elevated pottery from craft to high art—symbols of continuity and transformation within Nigerian modernism.
The fourth room bursts with the energy of the Zaria Art Society, whose members—Uche Okeke, Yusuf Grillo, and others—founded the doctrine of Natural Synthesis in 1958. Rejecting the Eurocentric curriculum of their college, they merged indigenous motifs with modernist principles, forging a distinctly Nigerian aesthetic. Dr Bruce Onobrakpeya, a later member and now nonagenarian, continues this lineage through his Harmattan Workshop, a creative rite of passage for generations of artists.
This section also connects to Jimo Akolo and to the Black Orpheus literary magazine of the Mbari Club, where writers and artists intersected. Its covers—some designed by Onobrakpeya—hang beside works by international peers such as Avinash Chandra, Naoko Matsubara, Ahmad Shibrain, and Ibrahim El-Salahi, embodying what Bonsu calls “polyphonic networks” of transnational collaboration.
Room Five, titled Eko (Lagos), captures the city’s post-independence vibrancy through archival photographs, album covers, and eight iconic portraits by J.D. Okhai Ojeikere, whose lens immortalised the sculptural beauty of Nigerian women’s hairstyles. The soundtrack—Bobby Benson’s Taxi Driver—revives the exuberance of Lagos’s 1960s nightlife.
Rooms Six and Seven explore the spiritual turn in Nigerian modernism. Susanne Wenger’s New Sacred Art Movement revitalised the Osun-Osogbo Grove through works invoking Yoruba deities. From her workshops emerged Jimoh Buraimoh and the Oshogbo Art School—artists like Twins Seven Seven, Jacob Afolabi, and Nike Davies-Okundaye, whose works channelled myth, ritual, and dream. Here, modernism meets mysticism—an expressive contrast to Europe’s rationalist tendencies.
Room Eight confronts the trauma of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970). Artists of the Nsukka School, including Obiora Udechukwu, reimagined uli—linear Igbo designs traditionally made by women—as a modern visual idiom. Their geometric compositions mourn and memorialise, embodying both beauty and grief, resilience and remembrance.
The exhibition concludes with Room Nine, devoted to Uzo Egonu’s Stateless People series—shown together for the first time in forty years. Living in Britain since the 1940s, Egonu painted from the liminal space of exile. His solitary figures—musicians, writers, dreamers—speak to the complexities of belonging and displacement, themes that resonate powerfully in today’s global art discourse.
Ambitious in scope yet sharply focused, Nigerian Modernism is a masterstroke of cultural restoration. Presented in partnership with Access Holdings and Coronation Group, with support from the Ford Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the show also draws on the Nigerian Modernism Exhibition Supporters Circle, Tate International Council, Tate Patrons, and Tate Americas Foundation.
As Ngozi Akinyele, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer of Coronation Group, aptly notes, this exhibition is “a cultural restoration in real time.” For Nigerians and the world alike, it marks a moment of recognition—where the nation emerges not through isolated icons, but as a collective force in global art history.
Nigerian Modernism redefines the parameters of global modernism, decentring Europe and affirming Nigeria’s vital place in that story. It opens the door for a new generation of artists—at home and in the diaspora—to build on this momentum. Ultimately, the exhibition positions Nigeria not merely as a place on the map, but as a metaphor for creative complexity: a nation, and an idea, ever in the process of becoming.
• Ade-Martins writes from the UK
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