These artists revolutionized modern art in Nigeria. They’re finally getting recognition further afield

By Suyin Haynes, CNN

(CNN) — Curved lines and block colors in shades of orange, yellow and blue create the image of an artist, framed by a border of abstract shapes. Look a little closer and you can see the artist’s beret with concentric circles, perched atop the solitary figure’s head as they lean over their work.

The painting is by Nigerian artist Uzo Egonu, as part of a series titled “Stateless People,” made in 1981. Egonu settled in Britain in the 1940s, where he spent most of his career until his death in 1996 in London. As an artist yearning for his homeland, Egonu crafted paintings that spoke to feelings of statelessness and the complexity of migration.

Think of modern art and you may think of Pablo Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe or Salvador Dalí. However, a new exhibition at London’s Tate Modern gallery shows how Nigerian artists have contributed to the movement throughout the 20th century. Egonu is one artist among the more than 50 represented in “Nigerian Modernism” — the first show at the museum to trace modern art from the country. It spans over 250 works created in the 1940s during British colonial rule, through to independence in 1960 and into the postcolonial period of the 1970s and 1980s.

“Where we would often associate modernism with European art history, there were in fact multiple contexts within which the language of modern art developed and evolved,” said Osei Bonsu, a curator of International Art at the Tate Modern.

Nigeria was a key hub for the development of modern African art, in part due to its colonial connections with Britain — several of the artists featured in the show had trained in London or other European cities before returning back to Nigeria, blending both European and indigenous techniques and forms within their work. As the country achieved independence from British rule, artists debated what new forms of nationhood, identity and art could look like. And while some techniques, such as uli — a traditional design practice indigenous to Igbo land in southeastern Nigeria, where women painted directly onto their bodies or created wall murals — may not have been viewed as modernist at the time, they incorporated modernist ideas such as improvisation and harmony through the use of positive and negative space, said Bonsu.

Merging traditional African techniques with Western art principles

One artist who is credited with pioneering Nigerian modernism is the sculptor and painter Ben Enwonwu. “His works were the cultural background to our growing up,” said Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, professor of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of the 2008 biography “Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist”. “Enwonwu made it possible to think about the arts as a respectable profession. In terms of Africa, he was the first African artist to gain global recognition and global prestige.”

Born in 1917 to an elite family in Onitsha, in the southeastern region of Nigeria, Enwonwu earned a scholarship to train at the Slade School of Art in London. Contemporary critics placed him in the same — if not higher — calibre as European modern masters, while famed British sculptor Henry Moore saw Enwonwu as a protégé and even bought one of his early works, said Ogbechie.

In 1957, Enwonwu was commissioned to create a sculpture of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, which elevated his already-respected artistic profile and prestige throughout the countries under British colonial rule as well as those that had recently gained independence. Yet Enwonwu also connected his Igbo ethnic identity and heritage with his classical art training in other aspects of his work. He used traditional sculpture techniques and tools inherited from his father, and in his paintings portrayed Igbo masquerade culture — a traditional ritual where masks, costumes and performance personify ancestral spirits.

“He foregrounded African cultural registers in his work,” said Ogbechie. “He was very insistent on the fact that if Monet could paint church facades and hay bales and water lilies and be considered a modern artist, there was no reason why he couldn’t paint masquerades and African market scenes and have them received in the same manner.”

Another artist now receiving recognition further afield is the potter and ceramicist Ladi Kwali, whose portrait appears on the 20 Nigerian naira note. Born in the Gwari region of northern Nigeria, Kwali became the first female trainee at the Pottery Training Centre in Abuja in 1954, and is known for infusing her modern ceramics training with traditional influences.

“I’ve been very drawn to her way of making, and I think it’s really interesting that she stuck to her own identity and maintained a certain way of doing things,” said Helene Love-Allotey, the head of department and a specialist in Modern and Contemporary African Art at Bonhams, a private auction house in London. Love-Allotey pointed to Gwari traditions, such as Kwali’s aunts teaching her techniques including handcoiling, and the recurring motifs of lizards and fish seen on her bowls and water vessels as examples of this blend within Kwali’s work.

Kwali is also a focal point of the current exhibition “Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art” on show at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York. Earlier this year in Paris, the Centre Pompidou’s summer exhibition, titled “Paris Noir: Artistic circulations and anti-colonial resistance, 1950 — 2000,” also explored the role, importance and influence of African artists in the Modernist movement.

Besides institutional recognition, African modern and contemporary artists have also gained greater commercial interest in recent years. In 2023, Kwali and her female peers from the Abuja Pottery Training Centre saw record-setting sales when their work was auctioned at Bonhams, while in 2018, an Enwonwu painting, “Tutu,” sold for $1.67 million. An auction this week of Nigerian modernist work will also feature pieces by Enwonwu and Egonu. “There is a wider recognition that artists from the continent, from this time, have perhaps been sidelined in comparison to their western peers,” said Love-Allotey, who also created and runs the Instagram account African Art History, which celebrates such artists.

The growing appetite from both private collectors and public audiences builds on years of scholarship by academics such as Ogbechie, and curator Bonsu hopes that this mainstream interest alongside the exhibition will prompt visitors to ask questions and reflect on their own cultural heritage. “We don’t always center African stories when we talk about world history,” he said. “This is an opportunity to think about the immense contributions that African artists have made towards art and art history, but also to society at large.”

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