Profile
We are pleased to return to 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair this year, including Emma Odumade’s exceptionally detailed portraits in our presentation. Read on to discover how the artist imbues his work with hope for the future, often guided by a divine light.
Emmanuel Odumade (b. 2000, Lagos) is a self-taught artist, an impressive feat considering the range of media he works across and the precise intricacy with which he creates his images. The series presented at 1–54 in London this October, Searching for Lights, juxtaposes images of school children over collaged backgrounds of vintage photographs and pages of his own sketchbooks, eliciting a simple yet potent effect of layering time over itself. Odumade’s collaged photos represent a lost past (lost being the operative word here, as many of the images references looted Nigerian treasures and the Benin Bronzes, relics of a history stolen from the nation) whereas the pages of his sketchbooks embody a future full of potential: “What is a sketch but an idea you intend to execute in the future?”
Odumade has previously featured in international art fairs such as Art X Lagos and 1-54 New York, and this will be the artist’s first showing at 1-54 London. Institutional shows include at the African Artists Foundation in Nigeria, the Kansas City Art Institute in the USA and at the Kunsthal KaDE in the Netherlands.
His imagery of school children speaks directly to his hopes for the future generation. “Some of my paintings are self portraits, and some of them are references to young people. In my practice, I depict young people a lot because I’m young myself, and I feel that young people embody an idea of beginning. When you see a school child, you see that innocence, you see that first stage of life and something full of learning potential.”
Beams of semi-divine light are used as a repeated device throughout the series, manifesting as symbols of this potential and a source of external inspiration. Searching for Lights sums up the artist’s hope in his quest for solutions to life’s infinite array of questions. The light rays also act as guides for the figures in his paintings, some of which meet the viewer’s gaze and some turn their faces away, a representation of Odumade’s own journey through life.
Growing up in Nigeria has not been easy for the artist, and he has moved back and forth between Lagos and Paris, using the French capital as a place of refuge. The artist candidly admits, “I moved to Paris in search of a better place, and a better chance of survival.” The inclusion of a single feather in the artwork Never Looking Back (2024) poetically encapsulates this idea of migration.
“To explain this work, which is called Never Looking Back (2024), you can see that the face is turned away from the viewer. This is me looking into my life, and turning away from the things I don’t want to experience anymore. There are some things that I will do whatever I can to avoid experiencing again. We all have weaknesses, as you can see by the Achilles Heel statue in the bottom corner, and the book on the table beside it is titled ‘My First Autobiography’. All the experiences documented in this book are what I’m moving away from.”
In a further use of synecdoche, black tea – which the artist uses to stain the collaged backgrounds of the canvases – comes to represent the personal histories of many of the generations Odumade depicts in his work, and overlaps with his current study of botany. Veins and roots and plant material all carry significance for Emma, who often equates the veins of plants and animals to the pencil lines he uses on his canvases. It speaks to a potent interconnection, “an arch that runs through every one of us.”
Segments stained by the tea are used to fill in gaps left by the charcoal. “I don’t completely render the body. I believe there is something deeper within the body, and leave parts exposed to show what is hidden. In this way, the use of the black tea is a representation of our souls.”
Few elements are left to chance in Odumade’s artworks. Meticulous both technically and emotionally, the artist places immense value on the memories carried by humans and objects.
“Memory is very important. I try to document my current culture so that, in 100 years time when the world has completely changed, I want people to be able to see how we lived now, which is why accuracy is so important to me. It’s a way of documenting my past and my memory through my eyes.”
