Pronouncement of Death.
Ayọ̀ Akínwándé
4 April 2026
Bruce Onobrakpeya, installation view of The Last Supper and The Fourteen Stations of the Cross. © Tate Photography (Jai Monaghan)
PostMortemism names both the procedure and the position taken here. This essay conducts a forensic autopsy of ‘Nigerian Modernism: Art and Independence’ at Tate Modern, an exhibition purporting to survey modern art in Nigeria. Yet beneath its surface, the curatorial framework collapses: the title is ill-conceived, the historical narrative shatters, and the show arrives already lifeless.
An autopsy is therefore necessary. Dissecting the exhibition’s structure, historical framing, and installations shows that it reproduces the very distortions it claims to challenge. Instead of situating Nigerian artists within a global history of modernism, one deeply indebted to African visual and sculptural traditions, the exhibition isolates them within a regional category. That category quietly reinforces the view of modernism as a European invention.
The examination finds core shortcomings. The exhibition uses ethnographic display methods, relies on incomplete research, lacks new scholarship, and excludes key artists. These omissions weaken its historical narrative of Nigerian modernism. The result is a static and incomplete account that fails to capture the period’s artistic richness.
To comprehend this failure, it is essential to examine the historical conditions that shaped modern art in Nigeria before analysing each of the nine galleries, thereby providing a foundation for the detailed critique that follows.
Olowe of Ise, Pair of wooden door panels and lintel, c.1910-1914. Photograph courtesy of Ayọ̀ Akínwándé.
When Does Modern Art in Nigeria Begin?
The exhibition’s chronological bracket, 1945 to 1995, does violence to the longer arc of modern art in Nigeria. That arc begins circa 1884 and arguably extends to 1994. The earlier terminus is not arbitrary. It corresponds to the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, at which foreign powers partitioned Africa without regard for extant cultural systems. Governance, trade, and artistic exchange all changed as a consequence.
In Nigeria, exploitation increased under the Royal Niger Company, which was chartered in 1886. It gained commercial and administrative control over vast territories. The British invasion of Benin in 1897 followed. Thousands of artworks were looted and taken to Europe.
Artistic traditions did not disappear. They adapted. Artists drew from spiritual and communal practices while responding to new politics. The 1928 discovery of Nok terracotta sculptures revealed a two-millennia sculptural tradition. This challenged colonial assumptions of African art as ahistorical. Twentieth-century Nigerian artists did not abandon these traditions. Instead, they reinterpreted them.
Ben Enwonwu’s death in 1994 marks a symbolic endpoint. His career spanned colonial rule, independence, and the postcolonial state. He was both an inheritor and an innovator. In this view, Nigerian modern art is not imitation but dialogue, a negotiation between local traditions and global currents.
Installation view of ‘Nigerian Modernism’ at Tate Modern, 8 October 2025-10 May 2026. © Tate Photography (Jai Monaghan)
Curatorial Pathology
Coherence eludes the exhibition, even though it brings together important artists and works. The title presents a problem. Why qualify modernism outside Europe? Those labels reproduce the hierarchy they claim to challenge. Another omission stands out: modernism’s debt to African sculpture is well documented. The exhibition avoids that entanglement.
Curatorial inconsistencies undermine the show. Glass vitrines display works as if they were ethnographic artefacts. Chronology is compressed. Important artistic lineages get limited attention. A complete account of Nigerian modern art must show how artists engaged with historical disruptions in both material and conceptual terms. Here, modernity emerged through sculpture, not primarily painting.
Consider the evidence. Olowe of Ise (1873-1938), Dada Areogun (1880 – 1954), and Ben Enwonwu extended the sculptural medium by drawing on indigenous traditions and engaging with global currents. The Fakeye family’s seven-generation woodcarving lineage includes Fakeye Akobi-Ogun (1870-1946) and Lamidi Fakeye (1928-2009). This lineage shows the continuity of carving practices. The exhibition includes Lamidi Fakeye but omits this lineage. Apprenticeship and hereditary knowledge shaped modern sculpture in Nigeria, yet these facts remain obscured.
Early photography receives similar treatment. Jonathan Adagogo Green (1873-1905) appears, but his work is presented as archival documentation rather than as modern practice. Excluding his peers is a missed opportunity. It could have highlighted the emergence of new visual technologies alongside European practices. These gaps fracture the narrative, isolating artists and obscuring networks.
Installation view of ‘Nigerian Modernism’. Image courtesy of Ayọ̀ Akínwándé.
A wider issue also emerges, linking to the gaps and distortions previously diagnosed. Influential Nigerian curators and scholars like Bisi Silva (1962–2019), Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019), and Chika Okeke-Agulu (b.1966) have shaped international discourse through contemporary art. This focus has left Twentieth Century Nigerian artists underrepresented in institutional histories. That imbalance is not accidental.
With this pathology established, the examination turns to the nine galleries.
Figuring Modernity
Confusion is clear upon entering the first room of the exhibition. Rather than clarifying the origins of modern art practice in Nigeria, the gallery scrambles them. Works by Jonathan Adagogo Green, Olowe of Ise, Aina Onabolu (1882-1963), Justus Akeredolu (1915-1984), Akinola Lasekan (1916-1972), and Felix Idubor (1928-1991) share the same space. Visual congestion results. Sculpture, painting, illustration, and photography from different decades compete without a curatorial hierarchy.
Green’s photographs of Benin royalty are displayed in a glass case. They read as museum specimens rather than modernist practice. Olowe’s carved panels hang beside Lasekan’s cartoons. Contextual grounding is absent.
A more effective curatorial structure would establish sculpture as the core of the exhibition. It would create thematic and chronological links among figures such as Olowe of Ise, Dada Areogun, Bamidele Areogun (1913-1995), Akeredolu, and the Fakeye woodcarving lineage. This would place them alongside masterpieces from Ife and Benin, revealing shared and evolving traditions. Academically rendered paintings by Onabolu, Lasekan, and Enwonwu, including the modernist Self-portrait from 1946, would then form one chapter. This would be within a wider field of experimentation.
That is not what the visitor receives.
Ben Enwonwu, Seven wooden sculptures commissioned by the Daily Mirror in 1960, produced in 1961, African hardwood of ‘Nigerian Modernism’. Photo courtesy of Ayọ̀ Akínwándé.
‘Ben Enwonwu: Ghosts of Tradition.’
The second gallery, supposedly dedicated to Ben Enwonwu (1917–1994), the preeminent modern Nigerian artist, collapses into disarray.
At the centre are Seven Wooden Sculptures Commissioned by the Daily Mirror (1960-61). Rigidly aligned on a platform, they lose the dynamism of their original outdoor installation. The walls are cluttered with paintings. Among these is Tutu (1973), which lacks the gravity and solemnity it needs. Archival photos and small sculptures rest in glass cases. Works by Afi Ekong (1930-2009), Gerard Sekoto (193-1993), and Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) appear in no particular order or with a clear curatorial intent.
The arrangement is a muddle, echoing the chaos of salon-style or Society of Nigerian Artists’ October Rain events. This may suit a crowded group show. For a dedicated Enwonwu gallery, though, it is a disservice. The display drowns the viewer and erases Enwonwu’s trajectory.
Wall texts focus on Enwonwu’s Négritude connection after his 1946 meeting with Senghor. That event matters, but making it central oversimplifies his practice. Enwonwu had already explored dance, ritual, and the spiritual before that meeting. In his work, dance is a metaphor for transformation. Elongated figures float between realms, striving for reinvention beyond colonial defeat. Enwonwu’s ideas go beyond Négritude. He draws from politics, tradition, and spirituality. His practice belongs in a Renaissance context, with an awakening motif.
Installation view of ‘Nigerian Modernism’. Image courtesy of Ayọ̀ Akínwándé.
That awakening is most visible in Anyanwu (conceived 1954–56; cast 1979–81). The sculpture celebrates Nigeria’s advancement toward self-rule and liberation. At Tate Modern, it sits inside a glass vitrine, a dusty relic incapable of speaking to the present.
A better curatorial approach would scatter the Daily Mirror sculptures at the base, rather than aligning them rigidly. Organic placement restores unity and movement. Vary the lighting: use an ambient wash plus spotlights to emphasise form and texture. Floor shadows would add drama and reinforce the spiritual, performance-driven elements central to Enwonwu. Place a sculpture at the centre to anchor the room. Install paintings, including Tutu, on one wall. Position smaller sculptures on the opposite side so viewers can trace Enwonwu’s evolving ideas. That is the structure his legacy deserves.
‘Ladi Kwali: Of Soil and Stone.’
The title carries depth: land, memory, rootedness, and continuity. All are central to Ladi Kwali’s practice. It also speaks to her bond with clay. Yet, the title hints at stone carving, a tradition less aligned with her ceramics. Of Earth and Fire would better match her focus on fired clay, vessel culture, and transformation.
Installation view of Ladi Kwali ‘s work, ‘Nigerian Modernism’. Image courtesy of Ayọ̀ Akínwándé.
After the density of the Enwonwu gallery, Kwali’s room offers a rare moment of stillness. The exhibition exhales. Earth-toned walls resonate with her materials. Her vessels occupy the centre beneath glass, arranged almost like an altar. Archival photographs and documents offer further insight into her life, training, and artistic development. The installation allows her work to command attention through quiet authority rather than spectacle.
But a damning question surfaces: Why is a room monopolised by Kwali alone? Her genius is clear, but isolating her erases the collective brilliance of the Abuja Pottery Training Centre and her peers. This exclusion is a grave misrepresentation. Abbas Ahuwan (b.1947), Raphael Ige Ibigbami (1938-2020) and Benjo Ivwilo (1938-2021) are absent, despite the opportunity this room presented to articulate a fuller view of Nigeria’s ceramic modernity. Isolating Kwali alone inadvertently echoes a familiar Western curatorial tendency: the privileging of singular genius over collective practice.
Kwali’s international visibility cannot be separated from her encounter with a British potter, Michael Cardew (1901-1983). Yet the formal intelligence of her work long preceded that institutional recognition. The incised surfaces, rhythmic patterning, and structural confidence of her vessels emerge from an already mature visual language rooted in her native Gwari (now Gbagyi) knowledge systems.
Archival material introduces a further tension. Documents from 1972 refer to Kwali as a “craftswoman”, a reminder of how her work was categorised during her lifetime. Here lies a quiet contradiction: Kwali’s ceramics receive contemplative reverence, while modernist sculpture elsewhere in the exhibition remains partially mediated through ethnographic framing. The result is physical and conceptual separation, distancing Kwali from the deeper ceramic histories from which her practice emerged.
Installation view of Ladi Kwali’s work, ‘Nigerian Modernism’. Image courtesy of Ayọ̀ Akínwándé.
Across Yorùbá, Igbo, and Gwari societies, pottery functioned not merely as a domestic utility but as a bearer of ritual, symbolism, and spiritual force. Vessels stored water, marked rites of passage, served shrines, and carried encoded meanings through form and surface. Seen through this wider lens, Kwali emerges not simply as an individual master potter but as a bridge between inherited knowledge and contemporary artistic authorship.
The room conveys dignity. It leaves context unresolved. Kwali is honoured here, but not fully situated within the wider continuum that made such brilliance possible.
‘New Art, New Nation: The Zaria Art Society.’
Stepping into the ‘Zaria Art Society’ room, one encounters an energetic field of paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture, experiments in form, colour, and visual language that collectively reveal a generation determined to negotiate inherited forms with modern artistic training. To present this moment as the decisive beginning of synthesis in Nigerian art, however, would be historically imprecise.
That intellectual and formal groundwork had already been laid decades earlier by Ben Enwonwu. His paintings, sculpture, and writings demonstrated that European academic technique could be meaningfully reconciled with indigenous visual thought and traditions. Long before Zaria, Enwonwu had established both the artistic possibility and the critical framework for such negotiation.
Installation view of ‘Nigerian Modernism’. Image courtesy of Ayọ̀ Akínwándé.
What distinguishes the Zaria Art Society, therefore, is not the invention of synthesis itself but its emergence as a collective movement. Enwonwu stood largely as a singular figure. Zaria brought numerical force, debate, and institutional visibility to the proposition. Through shared presence, the hybrid of Western formal training and indigenous visual reference acquired a sharper ideological definition and greater generational momentum.
At the centre is the Zaria Art Society, active between 1958 and 1961 at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, Zaria, a group of young artists who would go on to widen and institutionalise this conversation within Nigerian modern art. Present in the room are many core members: Oseloka Osadebe (1930-2011), Bruce Onobrakpeya (b.1932), Uche Okeke (1933-2016), Yusuf Grillo (1934-2021), Jimoh Akolo (1934-2021), Ogbonnaya E. Nwagbara (1934 – 1986), Demas Nwoko (b.1935), William Olaosebikan (1936 – 1996), Ikponwosa Omigie (1936-1997), Emmanuel Okechukwu Odita (1936-2025), Simon Okeke (1937-1969), and Felix Nwoko Ekeada (1937-2016).
Their mentor, Clara Ugbodaga Ngu (1926-1996), appears in the exhibition through works such as Abstract (1960) and Elemu Yoruba Palm Wine Cellar (1963), quietly anchoring the room. Though often positioned at the margins of the Society’s historical narrative, her influence remains unmistakable, in colour, draughtsmanship, and compositional restraint. One absence in the curatorial framing remains striking: Omigie, the Society’s only female member, is almost invisible in both interpretive narrative and visual emphasis. That omission narrows understanding of the group’s internal diversity and limits a fuller reading of its creative ecology.
Installation view of ‘Nigerian Modernism’. Photo courtesy of Ayọ̀ Akínwándé.
The room’s strongest works illuminate the Society’s enduring intellectual proposition: Natural Synthesis is the effort, articulated most clearly by Uche Okeke, to reconcile indigenous visual systems with modern artistic education. Onobrakpeya’s The Last Supper (1981) stages Christian iconography through distinctly African visual rhythms. Uche Okeke’s drawings pulse with the disciplined vitality of Uliderived line. Grillo’s surfaces reveal an artist continually refining structure through chromatic restraint and textured layering.
Nearby, Demas Nwoko’s wood sculpture The Wise Man demonstrates remarkable sculptural economy. Its placement behind glass introduces an unintended irony: a modernist work partially reabsorbed into ethnographic display. That irony is a reminder of how fragile the exhibition’s modernist argument becomes when display language slips.
Nwoko’s significance extends beyond sculpture. His architectural practice, most notably the Dominican Institute and Akenzua Cultural Centre, earned him the ‘Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement’ at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. That achievement might have been more explicitly woven into the room’s interpretive frame. His career, perhaps more than any other here, demonstrates how the ambitions of Zaria extended beyond painting into architecture, theatre, and spatial thought.
Across the gallery, one finds not stylistic uniformity but disciplined divergence: artists united less by visual sameness than by a shared determination to give collective force to a modern language already anticipated in earlier Nigerian practice. Individual brilliance is abundant. The internal conversation that made the Society historically consequential remains less fully
articulated.
‘Eko’
You enter ‘Eko’ through sound before sight. A swirl of Nigerian highlife, assembled by Peter Adjaye, fills the gallery. Record sleeves from the 1960s and early 1970s line the walls, among them Rex Lawson (1935-1971) and Victor Olaiya (1930-2020), whose music once defined an urban sonic confidence at the threshold of independence. At the centre stands a striking installation of J. D. ’Okhai Ojeikere’s (1930-2014) Hairstyles photographs (197-175), an elegant tribute to the sculptural inventiveness of Nigerian hair culture.
To one side, photographs of Lagos modernist architecture, produced by firms such as James Cubitt and Design Group Nigeria, document a city imagining itself anew in the years surrounding independence. Several buildings incorporate reliefs by Erhabor Emokpae (1934-1984), reminders of a period when architecture and visual art entered civic dialogue.
Installation view of ‘Nigerian Modernism’. Image courtesy of Ayọ̀ Akínwándé.
Nearby, sculptures by Emokpae and Ben Osawe (1931-2007) sit on a stark white plinth, curiously detached from the public settings that originally gave them civic meaning. A glass case containing Nigeria Magazine, the government’s principal cultural journal of the period, gestures toward the role of print in shaping visual consciousness during the independence years.
For all its sensory appeal, Eko exposes some of the exhibition’s deepest curatorial fractures. Lagos, historically Èkó, stood at the political, cultural, and economic centre of Nigeria at independence. Yet the room offers only fragments of how that city generated the symbols, infrastructures, and visual languages of nationhood. For an exhibition explicitly framed through independence, the absence of connective historical tissue is striking.
The story of the Nigerian flag, born from the 1959 design competition won by Michael Taiwo Akinkunmi (1936-2023), which was officially adopted in 1960, is absent. So too is the transition of currency from the Colonial Pound to the Naira in 1973, a profound visual shift in state identity whose iconography later elevated artists such as Ladi Kwali into national circulation through currency design. Monumental public commissions, including Ben Enwonwu’s Sango (1964), the Tinubu Square Monument, and Yusuf Grillo’s stained-glass interventions in Lagos churches, would have more fully grounded the room in civic visuality. Political history is similarly muted. The constitutional negotiations leading to independence, the speeches of Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa and President Nnamdi Azikiwe, the two national anthems, and the trauma of the Nigerian Civil War, together with the “no victor, no vanquished” declaration by the Head of State, Yakubu Gowon, remain absent from the gallery’s interpretive frame. Archival recordings or projected footage might have supplied emotional and historical depth beyond atmosphere alone.
Installation view of ‘Nigerian Modernism’. Image courtesy of Ayọ̀ Akínwándé.
The omission becomes more pronounced with the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, FESTAC ’77, arguably the defining cultural event through which Nigeria announced itself globally as host rather than subject. The transformation of Lagos through the National Theatre, FESTAC Town, and the unprecedented gathering of Black and African artists receives little sustained treatment. Materials now held at the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation (CBAAC), Lagos, together with milestones such as the establishment of the National Gallery of Modern Art in 1979 and publications such as Nucleus (1978), could have offered essential continuity. Their omission leaves a major gap.
Music remains largely atmospheric rather than analytical. Highlife is acknowledged, but the latter political force of Fela Kuti (1938-1997) scarcely enters the room. Lemi Ghariokwu (b.1955), whose album covers translated Afrobeat’s insurgent politics into visual form, is absent. Equally absent are earlier modernist composers such as Fela Sowande (1905-1987), widely regarded as the father of modern Nigerian art music, and Ayo Bankole (1935-1976), whose compositions brought Yorùbá tonal structures, liturgical inheritance, and Western orchestration into sophisticated dialogue. Their omission leaves unaddressed an important dimension of Modern art in Nigeria: the extent to which sound, composition, and musical theory also participated in the making of postcolonial artistic language.
If sound is the chosen entry point into Eko, then modernity in Nigeria through sound deserved a broader regional reach. The compositions of Laz Ekwueme (1935-2017), Hausa and Kanuri xylophonic traditions, Igbo and Tiv minstrelsy, and Yorùbá oríkì all offer sophisticated aesthetic systems through which modernity might have been expanded beyond urban shorthand.
Institutionally, the omissions continue. Yaba College of Technology, Lagos, established in 1947 and foundational to generations of Nigerian artists, is absent, along with figures such as Dele Jegede (b. 1945), David Dale (1947-2019), Kolade Oshinowo (b.1948) and Josy Ajiboye (b. 1948).
‘Eko’ does not function as the conceptual heart of the exhibition, where nationhood and artistic invention converge. Instead, it reveals how much of Nigeria’s modern visual history remains curiously underarticulated.
‘Osogbo.’
The exhibition’s treatment of ‘Osogbo’ unfolds across two adjoining rooms: one dedicated to the New Sacred Art Movement, the other to the Osogbo School. The separation feels conceptually forced. Historically, the two emerged through overlapping energies rather than distinct artistic worlds. What appears as two curatorial chapters might have been more convincingly presented as a single immersive environment, allowing the sacred, performative, and experimental dimensions of Osogbo to speak together.
Installation view of ‘Nigerian Modernism’. Image courtesy of Ayọ̀ Akínwándé.
The first room turns toward the Osun Osogbo Sacred Grove, the forest dedicated to the Yorùbá river deity Òsun. In the late 1950s, Susanne Wenger (1915-2009), together with Buraimoh Gbadamosi (1933-1992) and Adebisi Akanji (1935-2023), began restoring shrines and reactivating sacred sculptural spaces. Wenger’s role was pivotal: not simply as an artist but as a participant in a broader spiritual and artistic reinscription of the grove. Through sculpture, shrine architecture, and collaborative making, the New Sacred Art Movement developed an artistic language inseparable from Yorùbá cosmology.
The grove’s later designation as a national monument in 1965 and as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005 confirms the enduring significance of this intervention.
The room itself, however, struggles to translate that living sacred force. Subdued lighting produces not an atmosphere but visual dullness. The spiritual intensity of the works remains strangely muted. What should feel immersive appears observational. A more considered installation, through sound, projected ritual movement, or spatial modulation, might have conveyed the grove not simply as a site but as a living sacred ecology.
The adjoining room continues with artists associated with the Osogbo workshops. Because the spatial and conceptual transition is abrupt, the continuity between the sacred environment and artistic experimentation weakens.
Here appear figures central to Osogbo’s extraordinary creative surge: Asiru Olatunde (1918-1993), Muraina Oyelami (b.1940), Jimoh Buraimoh (b.1943), Nike Davies-Okundaye (b.1944), Twins Seven Seven (1944-2011), Adebisi Fabunmi (1945-2017), Rufus Ogundele (1946-1996) and others shaped through the catalytic interventions of Ulli Beier (1922-2011) and Georgina Beier (1938-2021).
Installation view of ‘Nigerian Modernism’. Image courtesy of Ayọ̀ Akínwándé.
Works such as Twins Seven Seven’s Condemning Witchcraft (1968) and The Devil’s Dog (1966) retain their metaphysical force. Later works by Davies, Okundaye and Buraimoh trace the School’s persistence across decades.
The room remains unexpectedly underpowered. Despite the imaginative charge of the works, the lighting is overly bright, flattening the ritual density that many of these images demand. A video of Duro Ladipo’s (1931-1978) theatre troupe, which should have introduced performative energy, loses much of its force beneath relentless illumination.
The deeper curatorial question concerns why Osogbo is divided at all. If Lagos receives one room despite its immense political and cultural complexity, why should Osogbo occupy two separate galleries when its sacred and artistic histories are so deeply intertwined? The distinction between the New Sacred Art Movement and the Osogbo School risks implying two separate histories where, in practice, there was mutual exchange: shrine restoration,
Theatre, workshop experimentation, music, myth, and image all fed one another.
A single multisensory room, structured through shifts in sound, light, and spatial rhythm, might have better revealed how sacred practice, workshop experimentation, and performative imagination together shaped one of Nigeria’s most distinctive artistic environments.
A further question lingers. Why did international exposure elevate many Osogbo artists, whose training remained largely informal, while artists emerging from formal Nigerian institutions often remained less visible in global narratives? That imbalance helped shape early international understandings of modern art in Nigeria, a legacy still evident here.
What these rooms contain is extraordinary material. What they fail to establish is that Osogbo was never simply a movement of images but a total cultural ecology in which ritual, performance, pedagogy, and invention existed inseparably.
‘Signs of Life: The Nsukka School’
By the time one arrives at the Nsukka room, the exhibition finally achieves curatorial coherence. Here, for the first time, a stronger sense of historical continuity emerges.
Journey (1993) by Obiora Udechukwu (b.1946) commands the entrance with remarkable authority: four panels held together by a yellow chromatic current that immediately establishes movement, tension, and formal discipline.
Obiora Udechukwu, Our Journey, 1993, Ink and acrylic paint on canvas (4 panels). Photo courtesy of Ayọ̀ Akínwándé.
Opposite, a photograph of the Uli wall design restores attention to the indigenous visual source from which much of the room’s intellectual energy derives. Nsukka should not be read as an isolated flowering. Its significance lies in how it extends an already established lineage within Nigerian modern art.
The earliest formal groundwork was laid by Ben Enwonwu, who, decades earlier, demonstrated through painting, sculpture, and writing that indigenous visual thought could coexist with European academic training without contradiction. The Zaria Art Society later transformed that proposition into a collective argument through Natural Synthesis, giving sharper ideological force to a hybrid already materially present in Enwonwu’s practice. Nsukka inherited that evolving discourse but redirected it through a more sustained engagement with regional visual philosophy, especially uli.
As Chuu Krydz Ikwuemesi (b.1966) observes, Ben Enwonwu founded the Department of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 1961 at the request of President Nnamdi Azikiwe. Initially called the Enwonwu College of Art, it was conceived within the intellectual spirit of post-independence cultural self-definition. The room’s strongest works reveal this inheritance clearly.
Installation view of Chike C. Aniakor, Ink on paper. Photo courtesy of Ayọ̀ Akínwándé.
El Anatsui’s Earth Moon Connexions (1993) and Solemn Crowd at Dawn (1989) display extraordinary formal control. Chike Aniakor (b.1939), Tayo Adenaike (b.1954), Ada Udechukwu (b.1960) and Olu Oguibe (b.1964), and extend uliderived thinking across painting, surface, and conceptual structure.
Unlike Zaria, whose synthesis often remained framed as a broad negotiation between inherited forms and academic modernism, Nsukka pursued deeper formal excavation. Uli was not merely cited but structurally absorbed, with line becoming philosophy, surface becoming language, and repetition becoming intellectual method.
Ndidi Dike’s (b. 1960) painted wood constructions extend the dialogue around form and material. It also raises questions of influence and originality within the school’s evolving vocabulary, especially in relation to El Anatsui’s established visual authority.
The room remains historically compressed, privileging works from the 1990s and obscuring earlier phases of the school’s development. Several works, including all by Aniakor, fall outside the stated 1995 chronological frame, creating temporal inconsistency and limiting a fuller understanding of Nsukka’s evolution across decades.
This reveals a broader structural imbalance. Nsukka is the only major formal art institution that is substantially represented in the exhibition. Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria; Yaba College of Technology, Lagos; Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife; the University of Benin; and Auchi Polytechnics remain largely absent, despite their profound contribution to post-independence Nigerian art.
The room shows formal maturity. Yet Nsukka should not be read as an isolated flowering. Its significance lies in how it extends an already established lineage within Nigerian modern art.
‘Uzo Egonu: Painting in Darkness.’
The exhibition concludes with a gallery dedicated to Uzo Egonu (1931-1996). His paintings convey a sense of unusual spatial calm after the density and uneven pacing of earlier rooms. The decision allows viewers to encounter his work with welcome concentration: surfaces unfold
slowly, and the dialogue between colour, abstraction, and line becomes more legible at close range.
Uzo Egonu, Stateless People an artist with Beret, 1981. © The estate of Uzo Egonu. Private Collection.
Egonu’s paintings reveal a sophisticated negotiation between European modernist vocabularies and Igbo visual memory. Across the room, abstract structures are repeatedly interrupted by signs that recall uliderived rhythm, organic patterning, and fragmentary figuration. His work demonstrates how diasporic abstractions could remain intellectually tethered to inherited visual systems without becoming illustrative.
As the exhibition’s concluding statement, however, the room introduces a structural ambiguity.‘To end with Egonu’s risks, suggesting that modern art in Nigeria ultimately achieves closure through diaspora rather than through the internal evolution of Nigerian artistic institutions and later generations formed within them. Egonu’s place within the wider narrative is entirely justified. His position as the final culmination, however, subtly displaces the developments that unfolded inside Nigeria after the foundational modernists.
Installation view of ‘Nigerian Modernism’. Photo courtesy of Ayọ̀ Akínwándé.
This is especially significant because by the 1970s and 1980s, Nigerian art schools had already produced a substantial generation of artists extending modernist debates through new materials, concepts, and regional vocabularies. Their absence here leaves the exhibition historically suspended between origin and diaspora, with insufficient attention to the generations that consolidated modernism within Nigeria itself.
A more compelling conclusion might have turned toward those later institutional trajectories: artists whose practices emerged from Ife, Ahmadu Bello University, Yaba, Benin and Auchi, whose works carried forward the intellectual foundations established by Enwonwu, expanded by Zaria, and deepened through Nsukka.
Placed differently, Egonu’s room might have opened outward into that larger conversation. As the final room, however, it leaves the exhibition in a state of partial displacement. The works remain powerful. What remains less convincing is the curatorial suggestion that. Nigerian modern art reaches its final resonance only once viewed from elsewhere.
Installation view of ‘Nigerian Modernism’. Photo courtesy of Ayọ̀ Akínwándé.
‘The Missing Generation: Artists of Nigeria’s Formal Art Schools.’
What remains absent from the exhibition is a crucial generational bridge: the artists trained within Nigeria’s formal art institutions during the 1970s and 1980s, many of whom extended modernist debates through new materials, conceptual approaches, and regional vocabularies. Without this cohort, the narrative of modern art in Nigeria appears historically compressed, moving too quickly from foundational figures to selected later developments without adequately showing how modernist language matured within the country’s own pedagogical structures.
At Obafemi Awolowo University, formerly the University of Ife, the Obafemi Awolowo Movement developed one of the most intellectually coherent post-independence artistic philosophies. Rather than rejecting inherited forms, artists such as Moyo Okediji (b.1956) and Kunle Filani (b.1957) drew directly from Yorùbá design systems, transforming pattern, symbol, and narrative into contemporary visual language. Bolaji Campbell (b.1950) and Tola Wewe (b.1952) further expanded this direction through layered surfaces, symbolic figuration, and a deeper conceptual engagement with Africanist form.
Up north at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, a later generation sustained formal inquiry while introducing sharper social and material experimentation. Gani Odutokun (1946–1995), Mu’azu Mohammed Sani (b.1958), Jerry Buhari (b.1959), Jacob Jari (b.1960), Tonie Okpe (b.1961), Duke Asidere (b.1961), and Abraham Uyovbisere (1963–2025) demonstrate how art in post-independence Nigeria evolved through academic discipline while remaining responsive to political and social realities.
In the south, Auchi Polytechnic produced artists whose chromatic confidence became immediately recognisable. Sam Ovraiti (b.1961), Ben Osaghae (1962-2017), Kainebi Osahenye (b.1962) and Olu Ajayi (1963–2025) developed vivid painterly languages, while Olu Amoda (b.1959) expanded sculptural possibilities through industrial material and formal restraint.
Installation view of ‘Nigerian Modernism’ at Tate Modern, 8 October 2025-10 May 2026. © Tate Photography (Jai Monaghan)
At Yaba College of Technology, artists and teachers such as Isiaka Osunde (1936-2010), Raquib Bashorun (b.1955), Abiodun Olaku (b.1958), Edosa Ogiugo (b.1961), and Rom Isichei (b.1966) helped sustain an urban visual culture rooted in surface control, atmospheric observation, and technical discipline.
What this overlooked generation makes visible is that modern art in Nigeria did not end with its first schools or first movements. It continued through teaching, institutional repetition, debate, and formal experimentation across multiple centres.
A room dedicated to this cohort would have revealed the deeper continuity of Nigerian art: not a sequence of isolated breakthroughs, but an evolving field in which one generation repeatedly inherited, contested, and transformed the visual languages of the previous one.
Without that bridge, the exhibition leaves modernism historically unfinished.
‘Cause of Death.’
After moving through all nine rooms, one feels not clarity but confusion. Despite substantial backing from Nigerian institutions, including Access Holdings, led by Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede, the Tate Modern’s Nigerian Modernism exhibition misses the mark. Curatorial depth and a grounded sense of history are absent.
Installation view of ‘Nigerian Modernism’ at Tate Modern, 8 October 2025-10 May 2026. © Tate Photography (Jai Monaghan)
One question looms. If Nigerian money made this exhibition happen, why did it not start in Nigeria before heading abroad? The usual excuse, Nigeria lacks infrastructure, rings hollow when the same elite bankrolling Western venues refuse to invest in local culture. Kwame Nkrumah’s point in Neocolonialism stings: economic power in postcolonial societies often props up outside authority instead of nourishing their own institutions.
The result is a display of modern art in Nigeria without any Nigerian expertise at its centre. There is no evidence of real fieldwork, no acknowledgement of Nigeria’s major art schools beyond Nsukka, and no recognition of institutional legacies. Poor installation, crowded displays, bad lighting, and strained narratives sap the art’s strength.
This is not a failure of Nigerian art. The works themselves are outstanding. What failed is curatorial rigour informed by field research and historical care. Curatorially, the exhibition registers no defensible scholarly achievement. On research, installation, and historical framing alike: failure.
The question that lingers is this: what does modernism mean in a Nigerian context? As Uche Okeke suggests, through his theory of Natural Synthesis, modern African art does not emerge from a break with tradition but from a conscious engagement with it. If European modernists could appropriate African forms and be called modern, then African artistic traditions themselves already contain the foundations of modernism.
In this sense, modern art in Nigeria can be understood not as imitation but as a practice grounded in the depth of existing visual, sonic, and spiritual vocabularies, one that builds on these forms while interrogating political, social, colonial, and postcolonial realities.
Ultimately, the autopsy shows that the exhibition did not fail for lack of important works, but for lack of the historical intelligence required to make them speak.
Ayọ̀ Akínwándé is a British-Nigerian artist working across painting, lens-based media, installation, sound, and performance. His work examines power, socio-political realities, and the interplay of tradition and modernity. He is also a curator, researcher, and writer, with international exhibitions and curatorial projects, including co-curating the inaugural Lagos Biennial (2017).
The exhibition is on at the Tate Modern until 10 May 2026.
Curators: Osei Bonsu and Bilal Akkouche
