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Lot Essay
‘ Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.’
– Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Rendered in dense layers of pastels and charcoal on paper, Toyin Ojih Odutola’s monochrome work Like the Sea II, 2014, draws the viewer into an emblematic and dreamlike world. A slender hand, which emerges from the top left of the pictorial plane, is poised against a finely detailed backdrop at once reminiscent of undulating waves, sloping country pastures and intricately patterned textiles. Composed entirely in black and white, the images appear to fracture and fuse simultaneously: as they diverge in execution, they merge in monochromaticity. Born in Ife, Nigeria in 1985, Ojih Odutola later moved to Alabama with her family. Today she lives and works in New York. Her artworks are poignantly infused with her own multi-layered and cross-cultural strands of identity. Exhibited in 2014 at the Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, the present work comes from a body of drawings collective entitled ‘Like the Sea’, based on a line from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Using her two younger brothers as inspiration for her subject matter, Ojih Odutola explores the shifting, fluid and transmutable conception of ‘home’ and ‘selfhood’ in an increasingly globalised world. Drawing from an array of personal sources, the present work embodies the ‘sea-change’ that each of us undergoes as we progress through life. ‘My family and I have constantly been affected by the places we have lived,’ the artist explains, ‘and in so doing have adjusted ourselves to every context. It’s something I have carried with me into adulthood—this application of compromising oneself to fit my surroundings—and my brothers as well. This is not something we view as strange anymore, having to change yourself or your nature to mould it into each and every context we find ourselves in’ (T. Ojih Odutola, quoted at Jack Shainman Gallery: https://www.jackshainman.com/exhibitions/past/2014/toyin-odutola/ [accessed 1st June 2018]). Ojih Odutola’s first major solo exhibition was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in October 2017, and this year four of her important artworks were donated to the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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‘Nigerian art,’ intuits Bruce Onobrakpeya MRF, ‘is dynamic because it is the product of cross fertilization and influences from at home and outside. This hybrid quality inherent in it, means that it can never be stagnant’ (B. Onobrakpeya, quoted in E. Iruobe, ‘Nigerian Contemporary Art,’ The Guardian, 3 November 2016). Such sentiments ring resoundingly true in the works of three prominent artists of Nigerian heritage, Njideka Akunyili Crosby (b. 1983), Toyin Ojih Odutola (b. 1985), and Ben Enwonwu (1917-1994). Though separated by at least three generations, these artists are nonetheless thematically linked through their pictorial explorations into the entwining complexities, fragilities and multilayers of identity and self-expression. Emerging at differing moments from an African country with a rich, albeit troubled, history, Akunyili Crosby, Ojih Odutola and Enwonwu have similarly produced a wealth of internationally-acclaimed art which speaks to the challenges of occupying multiple spaces, cultures, and narratives in an increasingly globalised and interconnected society.
Born and bred in Nigeria, Akunyili Crosby, Ojih Odutola and Enwonwu each left home to study in the West. Their experiences were to profoundly impact their lives and artistic practices. Akunyili Crosby left Nigeria for the USA at the age of sixteen. Today she lives and works in Los Angeles. Drawing on her native Nigerian heritage and her adopted home in America, her art weaves layers of identity and experience together to consider how they clash, collide, converge and coexist. ‘I think of myself as a woman, an Igbo woman, a Nigerian, an African, a person of colour, an artist,’ she has explained. ‘And the fascinating thing is the layers I add to how I identify myself changes over time. It just keeps broadening as I move further out into the world’ (N. Akunyili Crosby, quoted in ‘Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Inhabiting multiple spaces,’ video, Tate Modern, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/njideka-akunyili-crosby-18974/njideka-akunyili-crosby-inhabiting-multiple-spaces [accessed 27 April 2018]). Composed whilst still at art school, Veiled Sorrow (The Look of Failure), circa 2008-2009, is an early example of Akunyili Crosby’s self-investigative style, and indeed the exemplary drawing won an award from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at their prestigious Annual Student Exhibition in 2009. Rendered in charcoal on paper, the drawing offers a striking portrayal of the artist that is at once powerful and vulnerable, intimate and strong. Ojih Odutola ventured to the USA to pursue a career in art, and lives and works today in New York. Her practice draws from fact and fiction, history and myth, to investigate the transmutable and dynamic qualities of personhood.
Working some five decades earlier, the post-war artist Enwonwu, recognised from an early age for his artistic talents, was granted a scholarship to study fine arts in the UK in 1944 at Goldsmiths College, Ruskin College Oxford and the Slade School of Fine Arts, graduating with a First Class degree. As early as 1946, his work was exhibited in Paris alongside prominent European modernists at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou. He became a member of the Royal Society of British Arts (RBA) in 1948, and, having garnered great critical acclaim, was awarded a Membership of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1954. Two years later he became the first African artist commissioned to sculpt a bronze portrait of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. Renowned as a pioneer of African modernism, Enwonwu was instrumental in forging a new visual and cultural language for Nigeria. His large-scale canvas Untitled, 1967, beautifully encapsulates the artist’s distinct visual style which fuses together indigenous and Western modes of representation. The painting presents a central female figure, whose gestures are echoed by a rippling stream of women behind her: engaged, enthused and entranced in dance, they evoke a rhythmic sense of dynamism, movement, and unity. Their chiselled faces and statuesque bodies are informed by traditional African masks, carvings and totems, whilst the composition’s faceted planes and vibrant palette are strongly reminiscent of European Cubism and Futurism. Executed some seven years after Nigeria gained independence from its former colonizers, Untitled exemplifies Enwonwu’s pictorial expressions of national pride, autonomy and empowerment that inspired a whole generation of black artists around the globe. For Enwonwu, Ojihn Odutola and Akunyili Crosby alike, the black female subject becomes a poignant symbol of Africa’s resilience, beauty and fortitude in a hybridized and ever-changing world.
– Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Rendered in dense layers of pastels and charcoal on paper, Toyin Ojih Odutola’s monochrome work Like the Sea II, 2014, draws the viewer into an emblematic and dreamlike world. A slender hand, which emerges from the top left of the pictorial plane, is poised against a finely detailed backdrop at once reminiscent of undulating waves, sloping country pastures and intricately patterned textiles. Composed entirely in black and white, the images appear to fracture and fuse simultaneously: as they diverge in execution, they merge in monochromaticity. Born in Ife, Nigeria in 1985, Ojih Odutola later moved to Alabama with her family. Today she lives and works in New York. Her artworks are poignantly infused with her own multi-layered and cross-cultural strands of identity. Exhibited in 2014 at the Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, the present work comes from a body of drawings collective entitled ‘Like the Sea’, based on a line from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Using her two younger brothers as inspiration for her subject matter, Ojih Odutola explores the shifting, fluid and transmutable conception of ‘home’ and ‘selfhood’ in an increasingly globalised world. Drawing from an array of personal sources, the present work embodies the ‘sea-change’ that each of us undergoes as we progress through life. ‘My family and I have constantly been affected by the places we have lived,’ the artist explains, ‘and in so doing have adjusted ourselves to every context. It’s something I have carried with me into adulthood—this application of compromising oneself to fit my surroundings—and my brothers as well. This is not something we view as strange anymore, having to change yourself or your nature to mould it into each and every context we find ourselves in’ (T. Ojih Odutola, quoted at Jack Shainman Gallery: https://www.jackshainman.com/exhibitions/past/2014/toyin-odutola/ [accessed 1st June 2018]). Ojih Odutola’s first major solo exhibition was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in October 2017, and this year four of her important artworks were donated to the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
***********************************************************************************
‘Nigerian art,’ intuits Bruce Onobrakpeya MRF, ‘is dynamic because it is the product of cross fertilization and influences from at home and outside. This hybrid quality inherent in it, means that it can never be stagnant’ (B. Onobrakpeya, quoted in E. Iruobe, ‘Nigerian Contemporary Art,’ The Guardian, 3 November 2016). Such sentiments ring resoundingly true in the works of three prominent artists of Nigerian heritage, Njideka Akunyili Crosby (b. 1983), Toyin Ojih Odutola (b. 1985), and Ben Enwonwu (1917-1994). Though separated by at least three generations, these artists are nonetheless thematically linked through their pictorial explorations into the entwining complexities, fragilities and multilayers of identity and self-expression. Emerging at differing moments from an African country with a rich, albeit troubled, history, Akunyili Crosby, Ojih Odutola and Enwonwu have similarly produced a wealth of internationally-acclaimed art which speaks to the challenges of occupying multiple spaces, cultures, and narratives in an increasingly globalised and interconnected society.
Born and bred in Nigeria, Akunyili Crosby, Ojih Odutola and Enwonwu each left home to study in the West. Their experiences were to profoundly impact their lives and artistic practices. Akunyili Crosby left Nigeria for the USA at the age of sixteen. Today she lives and works in Los Angeles. Drawing on her native Nigerian heritage and her adopted home in America, her art weaves layers of identity and experience together to consider how they clash, collide, converge and coexist. ‘I think of myself as a woman, an Igbo woman, a Nigerian, an African, a person of colour, an artist,’ she has explained. ‘And the fascinating thing is the layers I add to how I identify myself changes over time. It just keeps broadening as I move further out into the world’ (N. Akunyili Crosby, quoted in ‘Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Inhabiting multiple spaces,’ video, Tate Modern, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/njideka-akunyili-crosby-18974/njideka-akunyili-crosby-inhabiting-multiple-spaces [accessed 27 April 2018]). Composed whilst still at art school, Veiled Sorrow (The Look of Failure), circa 2008-2009, is an early example of Akunyili Crosby’s self-investigative style, and indeed the exemplary drawing won an award from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at their prestigious Annual Student Exhibition in 2009. Rendered in charcoal on paper, the drawing offers a striking portrayal of the artist that is at once powerful and vulnerable, intimate and strong. Ojih Odutola ventured to the USA to pursue a career in art, and lives and works today in New York. Her practice draws from fact and fiction, history and myth, to investigate the transmutable and dynamic qualities of personhood.
Working some five decades earlier, the post-war artist Enwonwu, recognised from an early age for his artistic talents, was granted a scholarship to study fine arts in the UK in 1944 at Goldsmiths College, Ruskin College Oxford and the Slade School of Fine Arts, graduating with a First Class degree. As early as 1946, his work was exhibited in Paris alongside prominent European modernists at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou. He became a member of the Royal Society of British Arts (RBA) in 1948, and, having garnered great critical acclaim, was awarded a Membership of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1954. Two years later he became the first African artist commissioned to sculpt a bronze portrait of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. Renowned as a pioneer of African modernism, Enwonwu was instrumental in forging a new visual and cultural language for Nigeria. His large-scale canvas Untitled, 1967, beautifully encapsulates the artist’s distinct visual style which fuses together indigenous and Western modes of representation. The painting presents a central female figure, whose gestures are echoed by a rippling stream of women behind her: engaged, enthused and entranced in dance, they evoke a rhythmic sense of dynamism, movement, and unity. Their chiselled faces and statuesque bodies are informed by traditional African masks, carvings and totems, whilst the composition’s faceted planes and vibrant palette are strongly reminiscent of European Cubism and Futurism. Executed some seven years after Nigeria gained independence from its former colonizers, Untitled exemplifies Enwonwu’s pictorial expressions of national pride, autonomy and empowerment that inspired a whole generation of black artists around the globe. For Enwonwu, Ojihn Odutola and Akunyili Crosby alike, the black female subject becomes a poignant symbol of Africa’s resilience, beauty and fortitude in a hybridized and ever-changing world.