Yinka Olatunbosun
This November, one of Nigeria’s foremost contemporary artists, Demola Ogunajo, takes centre stage as Soto Gallery, Ikoyi, unveils one of the year’s most anticipated art exhibitions: Womb 2 Street.
The month-long solo exhibition—open from November 5 to December 8—features about 20 rarely seen works by the celebrated painter and conceptual artist, marking a defining moment in his decades-long creative journey.
Renowned for blending pop-art aesthetics with graphic design, illustration, and a disarming visual sincerity he proudly calls his trademark, Ogunajo has built a practice on exploring the meeting point between the sacred and the everyday. His paintings are vivid crossroads where bumper-sticker humour meets celestial warfare; where the mundane collides with the mythic.
In Womb 2 Street, audiences enter a lush visual universe animated by angels, Lagos street motifs, Yoruba symbols, and the irreverent pulse of pop culture. Drawing from Nigeria’s vibrant visual language—from truck decals and barbershop signs to comic-book heroics—Ogunajo creates works that are at once playful and profound, cartoonish yet cosmic. They confront enduring themes of faith, transcendence, divine struggle, and the absurdities of modern life.
At the core of his practice lies a continual reimagining of identity and belief. This new body of work represents a deeply personal inquiry—what Ogunajo describes as an exploration of Christ-consciousness, probing the tensions and harmonies between his Yoruba heritage and Christian faith.
“For me, creativity is like a child in the womb,” Ogunajo reflected while discussing the exhibition’s title. “It’s an autopilot kind of thing—the child doesn’t know, but it is being nurtured from within. The womb is the ambience that envelops everything I do.”
This symbolism captures the rhythm of his creative process: a movement from womb to street, from inner gestation to public expression.
One of the works on display, “Stilt Walk and Scorpion,” illustrates this metaphor with striking clarity. The colourful painting shows a man stepping carefully to avoid a scorpion—a visual allegory, Ogunajo explains, for how one navigates experiences that once caused pain or distress. “It is an attitude of carefulness,” he noted.
A graduate of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Ogunajo has spent over four decades refining his craft. Though widely recognised as a conceptual artist who works across multiple media—from acrylics to found objects—he maintains a fluid approach: “I allow each medium to define itself within the moment. This time around, it’s acrylic that I’m showing you.”
More than an exhibition, Womb 2 Street stands as a bold intervention in contemporary art discourse. It challenges the secular biases that often dominate the art world while resisting any simplistic reduction of spirituality to dogma. By fusing Yoruba visual traditions with Christian iconography, Ogunajo proposes a radical kind of inclusivity—one in which faith and culture are not competing forces but dynamic, evolving companions.
In an age when identity and belief are increasingly politicised, Ogunajo’s work offers a refreshing, transcendent vision: faith as lived experience, tradition as dialogue, and art as fearless testimony.
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