With Power of Portrait, Oliver Enwonwu Returns to the Exhibition Circuit

Yinka Olatunbosun

With 20 portrait paintings, the award-winning artist and art historian Oliver Enwonwu hopes to make his solo exhibition, which opens today at the Alliance Française building – a. k. a. Mike Adenuga Centre – in Ikoyi, Lagos, a talking point of the local art scene. Absent from the exhibition circuit since in 1999, when he held a show at the now defunct Iola Art Gallery in Victoria Island, the last of the legendary Ben Enwonwu returns with style.

The exhibition, whose opening this afternoon by 4pm will be graced by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, the French Ambassador Jerome Pasquier and the French Consul-General Mrs Laurence Monmayrant, is curated by Sandra Mbanefo Obiago, the Founder and Artistic Director, SMO Contemporary Art and is an articulation of years of research and critical appraisal of post-colonial as well as contemporary issues of identity. Titled Politics of Representation: The Power of Portraiture, the body of works in itself is a journey-cutting through centuries and cultures.

At a press preview of the works held at Omenka Gallery’s lagoon-front garden, the artist shared his thoughts on the exhibition. “I celebrate the African woman in form and rhythm through jewelry, adornment and apparel, drawing on historical narratives of black female defiance against cultural and political imperialism,” he said.

With a view to challenging the negative stereotypes of the African, he uses European techniques to explore African subject matter in the show supported by Louis Guntrum wines.

In form and content, the fascinating pieces echo the painter’s father’s take on the construction of identity under colonialism. The late Ben Enwonwu rejected the colonisers’ construct of identity for the African, defining it as “an identity in politics.” In the same vein, Oliver’s confident brushstrokes evoke that “generational cry of affirmation and power.”

The powerful portraiture celebrates the cultural, political, socio-economic achievements of African and how these have affected the identity of the global black race. “His works are odes to beauty, excellence and regality, reminding one of visual poetry in the style of a classical Shakespearean sonnet,” Obiago chipped in.

Some of the pieces are “Body of Power”, “Signares” and “Belle of Senegal” in which the artist interrogates women’s self-representation in connection with jewelry patronage and expensive garb; the cutting edge of fashion. With Wanderers’ Series, he explores the effects of migration, “dissolving boundaries and our notions of time and space.”

At the risk of being a show-spoiler, one of his portraits glorifies his father’s auction-smashing painting of an Ife princess, titled “Tutu”. The super-imposed painting fastens the kinship thread to her grand-daughter Princess Ronke Ademiluyi, who is also the great grand-daughter of the late Ooni Ajagun Ademiluyi, the King of the Ife Kingdom.

A master’s degree holder in visual arts with distinction from the University of Lagos, Nigeria, he has participated in over 15 exhibitions, delivered talks on global art market at international conferences.

The exhibition runs till October 10.

Encounter