Past
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1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair London 2024
10 - 13 Oct 2024 DADA Gallery presented a solo exhibition of Kofi Perry' s visionary works for the 12th edition of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair London. Kofi Perry (b.1998, Sidon) is a contemporary painter whose work and practice reimagines the ancient past through a contemporary Black American perspective. His large-scale, multi-figure narrative paintings,... Read more -
Tender Communions
22 - 28 Apr 2024 DADA Gallery is pleased to introduce Tender Communions, a group exhibition featuring Temitope Adebowale, Kwamé Azure Gomez, Luke Francis Austin, Osione Itegboje, Precious Opara, Kofi Perry and Cameron Ugbodu.
Tender Communions locates intimacy as a cardinal site of harmony and entropy. Imbued in each artist’s work is a pervasive right to opacity, a vivification of an individual and collective ability to pull the proverbial strings on that (or the parts of self) which are concealed and revealed. In these dynamic enactments of vulnerability and holistic imagination, radical intimacy exists between identity and auto-histories, ancestral and contemporary realms, corporality and the ethereal, the quotidian and the speculative. These optic, multimedia ritualisations are concurrently figurative, penumbral, monochrome and regally adorned.
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Lands of The Living
Bunmi Agusto 26 Mar - 7 Apr 2024 DADA Gallery is pleased to announce Bunmi Agusto’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, ‘Lands of the Living’.
The exhibition, curated by Agusto, features mixed-media works on paper continuing the artist’s world-building practice that follows life in her fantastical paracosm known as ‘Within’. Using a combination of painting, drawing and printmaking, Agusto juxtaposes opaque drawn figures with translucent printed images in order to explore the relationship between the physical and unseen metaphysical forces. With art historical references to ancient mythologies, Surrealism, the Zaria Art School and the semiotics of comic books, her works come together to narrate a magical tale that depicts death as transition and afterlife as simply another form of life. She draws from overlapping elements across Christian, Islamic, Buddhist and Yoruba religious ideologies —such as the concept of axis mundi and the positions of the heavens and earth— to introduce a geometric logic to the nature of existence. Read more -
Layered Textures
21 Nov - 3 Dec 2023 DADA Gallery is pleased to present Layered Textures, a group exhibition featuring Bryant Mclaughlin Van-Low, Corrine Slade, Joseph Aina, Jesse Akele and Theresa Weber.
Layered Textures explores the convergence of materiality and abstraction by bringing together artists who take a considered approach to the use of materials and textures in their practice. These artists work outside of binaries, employing nuance and complexity in conveying the human experience. Through the use of paint, fabrics and found objects, they explore themes of escapism, identity and power hierarchies.
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1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair London
Featuring Jesse Akele, Kwadwo Asiedu, Theresa Weber 12 - 15 Oct 2023 DADA Gallery is pleased to present Jesse Akele, Kwadwo Asiedu and Theresa Weber for 1-54 London, from 12-15 October 2023. Jesse Akele’s (b. 1995) work is concerned with investigating the inner life of her subjects and how this is moulded by experience. With subjects very much rooted in her world,... Read more -
1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair New York
Fidelis Joseph 18 - 21 May 2023 This marks the gallery's first collaboration with the artist who was recently awarded an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art Michigan, USA.
Joseph’s practice fuses his direct and indirect life experiences in Nigeria and the United States with the everyday information he collects from news media, in constant exploration of the profundity of the human condition. For Fidelis, the mind contains a wealth of information, and his interest in artistic media is to set forth fragments of events or scenes that he has encountered. He considers himself a documentarian. In the depth of his visuality is a treasure trove of the sublimity of African storytelling. There are nuanced odes to childhood stories passed on from his grandmother, the surrealism of some African folktales, such as Amos Tutuola, and the mythological conceit of Chigozie Obioma, Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri, J.P Clark, among other African writers. Alongside are western writers such as Dan Brown. He attributes his interest in fiction as contributing to his visual vernacular.
With each of the pieces presented, he intends to capture a subject matter that surfaces through the exploration of shapes and forms, and makes the impression of gestural representation, obscuring figuration, fragmentation and fractured imagery to encapsulate a more comprehensive narrative. His practice involves him learning from a finished piece in ways that he did not plan as his creative process is that which is led by intuition. In other words, his practice teaches him, as he tries to catch up with his intuition, at which point he feels satisfied. He looks for key lines and forms that reveal themselves and he thinks and reflects. He learns from what he thinks he knows, and it is rarely conclusive.
Fidelis Joseph was recently mentioned in the Financial Times as an artist setting a standard in the Nigeria art scene. His work was acquired by the Cranbrook Art Museum following his end of degree exhibition. Read more -
Reverie
Ayanfe Olarinde, Bunmi Agusto, Chigozie Obi, Kwadwo Asiedu, Sola Olulode, Yagazie Emezi 9 - 21 Apr 2023 Reverie seeks to explore an idealised version of reality, through the lens of contemporary artists working across different mediums. The artists consider new ways of thinking about their world and their places within it, particularly as it pertains to their identities as shaped by Nigeria. Reverie is presented as a site for dreaming, evoking a sense of movement out of the ordinary, a particularly salient need in light of the after effects of a largely disheartening election season. Read more -
Not Just Another Store x DADA
Precious Opara, Cherry Aribisala, Cameron Ugbodu, and Oluwatobiloba Ajayi 25 Mar - 6 May 2023 Together with our friends at Not Just Another Store, we will be showing a curated selection of works by Precious Opara, Cherry Aribisala, Cameron Ugbodu, and Oluwatobiloba Ajayi. Read more -
Art X Lagos 2022
Samson Bakare 4 - 6 Nov 2022 DADA Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Samson Bakare for the 2022 edition of Art X Lagos.
In this body of work, Bakare explores themes of individuality and self expression, with a focus on fashion. Characterised by vivid colours, bold patterns and Bakare’s signature protruding eyes, the aim is to show alternative ways of presentation, representing a shift from the confines of typical societal standards. It represents the seismic shift occurring within a new generation, using fashion as a way of self acceptance. This presentation serves as the artist’s debut of his life sized sculptures.
Samson Bakare is a Nigerian multidisciplinary artist. His work centres around Black identity and values in both contemporary and historical contexts. His practice is inspired by East African Coptic art, with the theme and subject of his work being a hybrid of classicism and stylisation which he calls Afro-classicism. His work is heavily inspired by fashion and he was among nine artists selected to re-envision and re-interpret the Gucci Ingrid 1947 bamboo bag.
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1-54 London 2022
The Spectacular Mundane of Within 13 - 16 Oct 2022 DADA Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work by Bunmi Agusto for the 2022 edition of 1-54 London. In this new body of work, the Spectacular Mundane of Within, Agusto focuses on portraying the everyday in her fantastical psycho-spatial planet of Within. She depicts ordinarily mundane activities... Read more -
Issue 001
Issue 001 4 - 16 Oct 2022 Read more -
Time, the Perfect Muse
22 Mar - 3 Apr 2022 DADA Gallery is pleased to present ‘Time, the Perfect Muse’, a dual exhibition featuring new works by Emily Moore and Hamed Maiye.
Moore and Maiye come together to question one of mankind’s most intriguing concepts – time. They do this through the interrogation of the process of story-making that creates what is known as the ‘past’. They question invisibility and malleability as it relates to time, drawing a link to ancestral memory and instinctive language as they explore a range of mediums and techniques which feel both new and familiar. Through this collaborative exhibition, they aim to create imaginative work as a means of recovering suppressed histories, through an understanding of the practices of generations preceding them.
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