"When in 2018 Ben Enwonwu's 1974 portrait of the Ife princess Adetutu Ademiluyi, Tutu, sold at Bonham's for £1.2m (four times its upper estimate), the author Ben Okri noted that "modern African artists are entirely absent from the story of art". It was an oversight, he wrote, that urgently needed rectification."
"Tate Modern's Nigerian Modernism show is precisely the art historical redress that Okri called for. Where the average Tate survey counts 200 works, the curators Osei Bonsu and Bilal Akkouche have assembled 300. It is a tally commensurate with the outsized task at hand: to delineate the art this vast country produced throughout the better part of the 20th century."
"Typically, Bonsu says, "when people think about the development of Modern art in Nigeria, they think about it as a history of colonial encounters, which are mostly predicated on this idea of Nigerian art being somehow behind the times or out of sync with the development of Modernism elsewhere in the world". Such a flattening, Eurocentric take on Modernism's emergence fails to account for the sheer variety of contributing factors that led the 59 artists included here to play around with form and deconstruct the figure."
Ben Enwonwu's 1974 portrait of the Ife princess Adetutu Ademiluyi sold for £1.2m in 2018, revealing longstanding neglect of modern Nigerian artists despite earlier auction recoveries. Enwonwu's sculptures resurfaced in an East London garage, underscoring past invisibility despite international recognition. Tate Modern's Nigerian Modernism assembles 300 works by 59 artists to map Nigerian artistic production across much of the 20th century. Curators frame the exhibition as a corrective to Eurocentric narratives that portray Nigerian modern art as delayed, emphasizing diverse influences and experimental approaches that reshaped form and the depiction of the figure.
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