By Joy Eke
DADA Gallery,
Lagos, Nigeria, is set to open Crosscurrents and Affinities, a group
exhibition bringing together seven Nigerian artists whose distinct practices
reveal different approaches to contemporary happenings.
Opening on
September 13, 2026, the exhibition brings together Nike Davies-Okundaye,
Kelechi Chinwendu, Chigozie Obi, Abiodun Olaku, Ayotunde Ojo, Kainebi Osahenye
and Kadara Enyeasi, creating a cross-generational encounter between established
and emerging voices in Nigerian art.
Curated by Anthony
Ogochukwu Agbapuonwu, the exhibition examines the varied styles, techniques and
philosophies that have shaped the Nigerian art landscape across generations.
Rather than presenting a single definition of what Nigerian art should look like,
it places different artistic languages in conversation: figurative works
embedded with cultural and fantastical narratives alongside landscapes animated
by interior and exterior scenes.
At the centre of
the show is the idea of connection: artists who differ in approach but share
certain cultural, historical or social concerns. The gallery describes the
works as sitting at the meeting point between inherited cosmology and lived
precarity, the visible and the invisible, the personal and the political, the
framework that gives the exhibition its title. By putting established figures
in dialogue with younger practitioners, the show also invites viewers to
observe how ideas and techniques evolve while continuing to resonate across
generations.
That resulting conversation
isn't necessarily one of similarity; it's found in the Crosscurrents,
the different directions and perspectives moving through contemporary Nigerian
art, and in the Affinities that connect seemingly different approaches.
Crosscurrents and
Affinities opens on September 13, 2026, at DADA Gallery, Lagos, Nigeria.
There is a moment,
standing before a painting by Dodd Brown Nkpa, when the eye stops trying to
resolve the figure into something familiar and instead begins to read it the
way one reads a piece of cloth, for pattern, seam, and texture rather than
likeness. This is no accident. Nkpa, a Nigerian mixed-media artist born in Jos
and raised in Port Harcourt, has developed a visual language in which the human
body is less a subject to be faithfully depicted than a surface to be
constructed, stitched together, quite literally in places, from paint, pastel,
and discarded Ankara fabric. His interest, as he puts it, lies in “the
possibilities that exist beyond conventional materials.”
