Six Painters Show 'Fragments'

Fragment, a miniature art fair at ArtLab Gallery, brings together six painters working across realism, landscape, abstraction, figurative painting and watercolour, with their works presented in smaller formats. Opening on October 17, 2026, at 8 Isaac John Street, Ikeja GRA, Lagos, Nigeria.

The exhibition explores what happens when artists compress scenes of everyday life, cultural memory and observation into intimate dimensions. Rather than approaching the works simply as smaller paintings, the exhibition invites closer looking, with details, textures and gestures becoming more apparent as the viewer moves towards the frame.

In his catalogue note, gallery manager Timi Balogun describes the exhibition as a gathering of artists whose small-format works engage memory, cultural documentation, identity and everyday life in concentrated form. He argues that miniature art changes how we look, drawing the viewer close and slowing the eye. That idea provides a useful entry point into Fragments, particularly when the works are considered alongside the artists' published biographies and the images reproduced in the exhibition catalogue. 

Featuring: Lekan Onabanjo, Kola Olojo-Kosoko, Adewale Awesu, Moses Oghagbon, Paul Ayokhai and Olumuyiwa Olusola. 

Lekan Onabanjo graduated from the Federal Polytechnic, Auchi, and has long used watercolour as his primary medium, though his practice has also extended into oil, acrylic, enamel, pastel, and charcoal. Three works reproduced in the catalogue show how his approach shifts between observation and atmosphere.

In two narrow alleyway scenes, hard contrasts of light and shadow create a strong sense of depth. In one, a lone figure in a blue shirt moves through a sunlit lane bordered by ochre and rust-coloured façades. The perspective funnels the eye inward, making the small scale feel less like a conventional vista and more like a glimpse into a passing moment. Another landscape, with russet and orange trees reflected in dark still water beneath a heavy sky, is quieter tonally and sits somewhere between naturalism and abstraction.

Onabanjo's biography reflects this range. He has exhibited for about three decades in Nigeria, the United Kingdom, the United States, Sweden and Italy, working across several media while maintaining a strong connection to landscape and observation.

Adewale Awesu approaches the miniature format through polished realism. A graduate of Yaba College of Technology who trained in the studios of established masters, Awesu reportedly works with both a sketchpad and camera, collecting moments that might otherwise go unnoticed. 

In one of the works on view, three men walk away from the viewer carrying talking drums. Their yellow garments bear blue patterns, while the glossy amber-coloured floor catches their reflections. The composition places the viewer behind them, almost as another person following the procession.

Another work presents Lagos from above at dusk, with rust-red rooftops stretching towards the lagoon and skyline towers beneath a hazy orange sun. The small format rewards close attention to its details. Warm reds and oranges are balanced with blue, while the city itself becomes a kind of fragment, an entire urban landscape reduced to a contained field of vision.

Moses Oghagbon, a Lagos-based painter and documentary photographer, approaches memory almost as a cultural archivist. His biography points to bodies of work including the Argungu series, Colours of Uhola and Yauri View. 

Two riders in yellow tunics on donkeys emerge from pale dust in one of the paintings, their forms appearing to disperse into the surrounding atmosphere. In another, a road at dusk leads towards glowing fires, with trees rendered in thick, sculptural strokes. A third work shows three robed figures in red silhouetted against a blazing yellow-orange sky, apparently lit from below by what looks like a cooking fire. 

The heavy impasto suggests palette-knife work, giving the surfaces a tactile, almost geological quality. Oghagbon repeatedly contrasts warm and cool passages: cold evening skies against burning ground, muted landscapes against points of intense colour. The catalogue notes that he received an honorary doctorate in painting in 2025. His paintings in Fragments read as visual records intended to preserve particular places, people and moments beyond their immediate circumstances. 

Kola Olojo-Kosoko, who exhibits as KKK Olojo, is a lecturer and chairman of the Society of Nigerian Artists' Lagos chapter. His practice draws from painting, textile design, sculpture and photography. 

His painting of a gathering beneath a large umbrella may be among the most memorable works in the exhibition. A blazing red-orange canopy dominates the scene, while market stalls appear in blues, greens, pinks and yellows. Thick, jewel-like dabs of paint turn the crowd into a mosaic of colour.

In another work, a blue-robed horseman stands against a mustard-coloured ground, creating a strong contrast between the cool figure and warm field. A third painting, depicting what appears to be a canal or waterway, is more muted, with misty greys and greens. It is perhaps the quietest of the three and demonstrates a different kind of restraint.

Paul Ayokhai, a graduate of Auchi Polytechnic, takes the exhibition furthest from straightforward representation. His stated interest lies in emotion, colour and the dialogue between artist and viewer.

 One reproduced work is a dense, crusted composition of yellow, green, red and blue arranged vertically and moving towards abstraction. Another presents a glowing tree canopy in reds and oranges against teal and yellow-green. A stark monochrome work, interrupted by a single white band, is more difficult to read from the reproduction available in the catalogue, with its forms not entirely clear.

Ayokhai's paintings are among the most gestural in the exhibition. They seem to ask the viewer to respond to colour and surface before attempting to identify what is being presented.

Olumuyiwa Olusola, known as Sola Muyiwa, works in coffee as well as watercolour. The catalogue credits him with the Best Watercolour award at a World Art Day exhibition in Uttar Pradesh, India, in 2023. It also identifies him as the only Nigerian qualifier in a virtual international watercolour competition in France in 2025, and credits him with the largest watercolour painting sold at the SOGAL 2025 auction, measuring 8 by 4 feet. 

His portraits demonstrate a careful control of transparency. One depicts an elderly man in a white cap with a full white beard, with loose passages of red and blue surrounding the figure. Areas of unpainted paper help form the beard. Another seated profile dissolves gradually into magenta, violet and teal, while a man reading a newspaper is rendered largely in cool blues with a sharp red accent. 

Despite the looseness of the medium, the sitters retain their presence. The paintings depend on the transparency of watercolour without allowing the figures to disappear entirely into it.

Taken together, the six artists create a conversation across very different approaches to painting: reportage, realism, impasto, abstraction and watercolour. Yet their subjects repeatedly return to recognisable aspects of life, markets, drummers, rooftops, landscapes and riders or horsemen that appear to reference northern Nigerian life.

The central question raised by Fragments, however, is also its most interesting one: how literally should the works be understood as miniatures? Several of the paintings appear to be compositions that could comfortably occupy a much larger wall. 

That question will ultimately be answered in the gallery, where viewers can encounter the works at their actual dimensions. What the exhibition already demonstrates, however, is the value of concentrating six distinct practices within a smaller field. The reduced scale encourages sustained looking, while the differences between the artists provide several ways of thinking about what a painting can contain, even within a limited space.

Fragments opens at 2pm on Saturday, October 17, and runs into early November 2026.

Inserted some of the paintings for the fair.  Courtesy of the artists. All rights reserved.

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