Nearly 70 years ago, touring Nigeria in 1956, Queen Elizabeth commissioned an over-life-size portrait from sculptor Ben Enwonwu, to stand in the Nigerian parliament and symbolise continuing friendship between Britain and soon-to-be independent Nigeria. Enwonwu came to Buckingham Palace for many sittings, a historic encounter: the first African artist to depict a European monarch.
The work was controversial. The Daily Mail criticised the “distinct Africanisation of the features” — precisely Enwonwu’s intention. The Queen’s face evokes his famous bronze “Anyanwu” (“Eye of the Sun”, 1955), an elongated surging figure representing Igbo Earth goddess Ani, and symbolising, Enwonwu said, “our rising nation”. The then Nigerian president Shehu Shagari later presented a small version of “Anyanwu” to the Queen. Lent by King Charles, this gleaming, slender, tapering form, at once delicate and assertive, is a highlight of Tate Modern’s entrancing, enlightening exhibition Nigerian Modernism.
‘The Adanma Masquerade‘ (1989) by Okpu Eze © Yemisi Shyllon Museum
To the upbeat tempo of highlife music sounding throughout, this colourful, bounteous show celebrates an emerging country and its developing art around the period of independence in 1960. Enwonwu, the father figure, born in 1917, has a large solo room; a few predecessors and some 50 younger artists, varying in quality, are grouped loosely by location and chronology across generous, spacious galleries, but there’s considerable overlap and some outliers. The show really invites a wandering flâneur approach.
Closing a circle of appropriation, Yusuf Grillo responds to western modernism via the very African traditions which inspired Picasso
What shines everywhere is a sparkling diversity of making. Asiru Olatunde, from a family of blacksmiths, hammers aluminium into a massive, exquisitely detailed frieze of African village life in “The Garden of Eden”. Adebisi Akanji, trained as a bricklayer, sculpts decorative Yoruba gods in cement, “Osun” and “Ogun Timeyin”. Yoruba priest Sàngódáre Gbádégesin Àjàlá tie-dyes batik into swirling hangings depicting folklore, music-making, rhythms of drums and sticks. Formally perfect, each is seamlessly connected with local craft.
Opening the show, prologue to all this, is Olowe of Ise’s monumental polychrome wood relief carved on a door, 1910-14, recording a reception by the Ogoga (king) of Ikere for British commissioner Captain William Ambrose. Lacklustre and effete, the white man is a suppliant carried in a hammock, while some 30 animated African figures projecting towards us create a compelling picture of palace life: wives, children, servants, prisoners, attending the rather condescending monarch.
Obiora Udechukwu’s ‘Our Journey’ (1993) © Obiora Udechukwu/Hood Museum of Art
It’s a tremendous start: Olowe introduces Nigeria’s great, continuing sculptural tradition, and predicts a colonial reversal. Half a century later, Demas Nwoko’s painting “Nigeria in 1959” features a trio of worn-out, fading white dignitaries, faces drawn, posed in their imperial seats but hardly secure for, lurking in the shadows, heavy black figures await liberation. Are they death’s messengers, or symbols of a new, just materialising power?
From Olowe we walk straight into the show’s star piece: Enwonwu’s “Seven Wooden Sculptures” commissioned for the Daily Mirror’s Holborn headquarters in 1960. Ranging from one to two metres, in different postures though all thrusting upwards, each ebony figure has traditional attenuated Igbo features, the narrowing body of “Anyanwu”, and several hold an open newspaper — suggesting a hymn book, or wings.
Olowe of Ise’s wood relief carved on a door (1910-14) © Trustees of the British Museum
Son of a Royal Niger Company engineer who also carved sacred images, Enwonwu saw himself as the sculptor upholding Nigerian tradition, but also as a global synthesiser. With “Seven Sculptures” he wanted to “represent the wings of the Daily Mirror, flying news all over the world . . . The group forms a sort of chorus. It is almost a religious group. All art . . . has a religious feeling — a belief in humanity”. The figures’ arrangement is flexible; here they form a theatrical procession. Long lost, “Seven Wooden Sculptures” was discovered in Bethnal Green Academy’s garage in 2012.
Enwonwu’s paintings, treating Nigerian subjects in the language of western modernism, never match his sculptural achievement, but become vibrant when their subject is dance: the whirling figures in festive procession “The Durbar of Eid ul-Fitr, Kano, Nigeria”, and the “Dancers” series, stylised Igbo masquerade performers whose frenzied movements are conveyed in flowing lines, dramatic diagonals, chromatic layering. They chart a double transformation: the dancers are men dressed as white-faced masked girls, and cultural heritage becomes postcolonial modernist expression.
Jimo Akolo’s ‘Fulani Horsemen’ (1962) © Bristol Museum and Art Gallery
To modernise and “grow with the new Nigeria” was the aim of the young painters of the Zaria Art Society, founded in 1958. Seeking a “natural synthesis” of African and European styles, they are the show’s painterly heart: without quite throwing off the derivative mantle, they embody in arresting images the heady 1960s spirit of independence.
Jimo Akolo’s theatrically patterned, flattened “Fulani Horsemen” gallop right against the picture plane and off to the future; they recall the Blaue Reiter revolutionary steeds. Erhabor Emokpae’s blocky black heads “The New Seekers” rise from a dark ground lit by a red moon; the aesthetic is Malevich’s. Uche Okeke, who studied in Munich, applied German expressionist distortion, jarring colours and gestural energy to narratives memorialising Nigeria’s clash of indigenous versus colonial/missionary culture. In “The Conflict (After Achebe)” a Christian unmasks an egwugwu, a spiritual ancestor in physical form, to devastating destructive effect — a scene from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.
When the mysterious woman composed of geometric planes in Yusuf Grillo’s purple-blue “The Seventh Knot” raises her arms to adjust her headdress, we think of both African sculpture and a figure from “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”. Closing a circle of appropriation, Grillo responds to western modernism via the very African traditions which inspired Picasso. He also co-opts, here and in “The Drummers Return” and “Woman”, Picasso’s Blue period tonality.
Fortuitously concurrent, Tate’s exhibition Theatre Picasso a few steps away displays Picasso’s paintings resembling African carvings, such as “Bust of a Woman”. You can trace influence both ways. Particularly affecting is Uzo Egonu’s post-cubist “Woman in Grief” (1968), an abstracted distressed figure bent double, head tucked inwards: a Weeping Woman of the 1967-70 Biafran War, the catastrophic civil conflict of postcolonial division.
Ben Enwonwu’s ‘The Boxer’ (1942) © The Ben Enwonwu Foundation
After the Igbo/Biafra defeat, artists of the Nsukka School sought to translate uli motifs — Igbo body decorations — into linear, calligraphic abstractions such as Obiora Udechukwu’s “Our Journey” (1993): a fat yellow line spirals into a python, a sacred messenger, accompanying shadowy human heads travelling through Nigeria’s postcolonial landscape. It’s haunting, and a rarity, for Nigerian Modernism’s paintings mostly trail off after 1970, becoming self-conscious, laboured, overwrought in their spiritual/political messaging.
But the carved sculptures remain stunning. Emokpae’s paired truncated cones “Life and Death” (1967); an elegant, long, curving, half-cubist, half-African mask form (untitled, 1977) by Ben Osawe, whose father was sculptor to Benin’s Oba Eweka II; and Okpu Eze’s mahogany “The Adanma Masquerade” (1989), a lithe abstracted dancer with ribbed twisting body, head a sublime tilting oval, line up like sentinels in the Thames-facing gallery. Traditional, modernist, timelessly lovely, they hold their own against St Pauls and London’s cityscape. What a show: Tate’s most revelatory in years.
‘Nigerian Modernism’, Tate Modern, London, to May 10 2026
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