{"id":205235,"date":"2025-10-11T13:45:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-11T13:45:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/205235\/"},"modified":"2025-10-11T13:45:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-11T13:45:12","slug":"nigerian-modernism-is-tate-moderns-most-revelatory-show-in-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/205235\/","title":{"rendered":"Nigerian Modernism is Tate Modern\u2019s most revelatory show in years"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

The work was controversial. The Daily Mail criticised the \u201cdistinct Africanisation of the features\u201d \u2014 precisely Enwonwu\u2019s intention. The Queen\u2019s face evokes his famous bronze \u201cAnyanwu\u201d (\u201cEye of the Sun\u201d, 1955), an elongated surging figure representing Igbo Earth goddess Ani, and symbolising, Enwonwu said, \u201cour rising nation\u201d. The then Nigerian president Shehu Shagari later presented a small version of \u201cAnyanwu\u201d to the Queen. Lent by King Charles, this gleaming, slender, tapering form, at once delicate and assertive, is a highlight of Tate Modern\u2019s entrancing, enlightening exhibition Nigerian Modernism.<\/p>\n

\"A\u2018The Adanma Masquerade\u2018 (1989) by Okpu Eze \u00a9 Yemisi Shyllon Museum<\/p>\n

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\u2019s considerable overlap and some outliers. The show really invites a wandering fl\u00e2neur approach.<\/p>\n

Closing a circle of appropriation, Yusuf Grillo responds to western modernism via the very African traditions which inspired Picasso<\/p>\n

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 \u201cThe Garden of Eden\u201d. Adebisi Akanji, trained as a bricklayer, sculpts decorative Yoruba gods in cement, \u201cOsun\u201d and \u201cOgun Timeyin\u201d. Yoruba priest S\u00e0ng\u00f3d\u00e1re Gb\u00e1d\u00e9gesin \u00c0j\u00e0l\u00e1 tie-dyes batik into swirling hangings depicting folklore, music-making, rhythms of drums and sticks. Formally perfect, each is seamlessly connected with local craft.<\/p>\n

Opening the show, prologue to all this, is Olowe of Ise\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"AnObiora Udechukwu\u2019s \u2018Our Journey\u2019 (1993) \u00a9 Obiora Udechukwu\/Hood Museum of Art<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a tremendous start: Olowe introduces Nigeria\u2019s great, continuing sculptural tradition, and predicts a colonial reversal. Half a century later, Demas Nwoko\u2019s painting \u201cNigeria in 1959\u201d 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\u2019s messengers, or symbols of a new, just materialising power?<\/p>\n

From Olowe we walk straight into the show\u2019s star piece: Enwonwu\u2019s \u201cSeven Wooden Sculptures\u201d commissioned for the Daily Mirror\u2019s 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 \u201cAnyanwu\u201d, and several hold an open newspaper \u2014 suggesting a hymn book, or wings.<\/p>\n

\"AOlowe of Ise\u2019s wood relief carved on a door (1910-14) \u00a9 Trustees of the British Museum<\/p>\n

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 \u201cSeven Sculptures\u201d he wanted to \u201crepresent the wings of the\u00a0Daily Mirror, flying news all over the world\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009The group forms a sort of chorus. It is almost a religious group. All art\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009has a religious feeling\u00a0\u2014 a belief in humanity\u201d. The figures\u2019 arrangement is flexible; here they form a theatrical procession. Long lost, \u201cSeven Wooden Sculptures\u201d was discovered in Bethnal Green Academy\u2019s garage in 2012.<\/p>\n

Enwonwu\u2019s 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 \u201cThe Durbar of Eid ul-Fitr, Kano, Nigeria\u201d, and the \u201cDancers\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\"AJimo Akolo\u2019s \u2018Fulani Horsemen\u2019 (1962) \u00a9 Bristol Museum and Art Gallery<\/p>\n

To modernise and \u201cgrow with the new Nigeria\u201d was the aim of the young painters of the Zaria Art Society, founded in 1958. Seeking a \u201cnatural synthesis\u201d of African and European styles, they are the show\u2019s painterly heart: without quite throwing off the derivative mantle, they embody in arresting images the heady 1960s spirit of independence.<\/p>\n

Jimo Akolo\u2019s theatrically patterned, flattened \u201cFulani Horsemen\u201d gallop right against the picture plane and off to the future; they recall the Blaue Reiter revolutionary steeds. Erhabor Emokpae\u2019s blocky black heads \u201cThe New Seekers\u201d rise from a dark ground lit by a red moon; the aesthetic is Malevich\u2019s. Uche Okeke, who studied in Munich, applied German expressionist distortion, jarring colours and gestural energy to narratives memorialising Nigeria\u2019s clash of indigenous versus colonial\/missionary culture. In \u201cThe Conflict (After Achebe)\u201d a Christian unmasks an egwugwu, a spiritual ancestor in physical form, to devastating destructive effect \u2014 a scene from Chinua Achebe\u2019s Things Fall Apart.<\/p>\n

When the mysterious woman composed of geometric planes in Yusuf Grillo\u2019s purple-blue \u201cThe Seventh Knot\u201d raises her arms to adjust her headdress, we think of both African sculpture and a figure from \u201cLes Demoiselles d\u2019Avignon\u201d. 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 \u201cThe Drummers Return\u201d and \u201cWoman\u201d, Picasso\u2019s Blue period tonality.<\/p>\n

Fortuitously concurrent, Tate\u2019s exhibition Theatre Picasso<\/a> a few steps away displays Picasso\u2019s paintings resembling African carvings, such as \u201cBust of a Woman\u201d. You can trace influence both ways. Particularly affecting is Uzo Egonu\u2019s post-cubist \u201cWoman in Grief\u201d (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.<\/p>\n

\"ABen Enwonwu\u2019s \u2018The Boxer\u2019 (1942) \u00a9 The Ben Enwonwu Foundation<\/p>\n

After the Igbo\/Biafra defeat, artists of the Nsukka School sought to translate\u00a0uli\u00a0motifs \u2014 Igbo body decorations \u2014 into linear, calligraphic abstractions such as Obiora Udechukwu\u2019s \u201cOur Journey\u201d (1993): a fat yellow line spirals into a python, a sacred messenger, accompanying shadowy human heads travelling through Nigeria\u2019s postcolonial landscape. It\u2019s haunting, and a rarity, for Nigerian Modernism\u2019s paintings mostly trail off after 1970, becoming self-conscious, laboured, overwrought in their spiritual\/political messaging.<\/p>\n

But the carved sculptures remain stunning. Emokpae\u2019s paired truncated cones \u201cLife and Death\u201d (1967); an elegant, long, curving, half-cubist, half-African mask form (untitled, 1977) by Ben Osawe, whose father was sculptor to Benin\u2019s Oba Eweka II; and Okpu Eze\u2019s mahogany \u201cThe Adanma Masquerade\u201d (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\u2019s cityscape. What a show: Tate\u2019s most revelatory in years.<\/p>\n

\u2018Nigerian Modernism\u2019<\/a>, Tate Modern, London, to May 10 2026<\/p>\n

Find out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram<\/a>, Bluesky<\/a> and X<\/a>, and sign up<\/a> to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n