It's like learning a language. First you learn the alphabet, then you learn to spell, then you learn to put sentences together.
Edozie Anedu’s latest body of work, Allegory, is an etymology of symbols. Referencing popular culture and religious iconography, he investigates how meaning is made and held in the collective unconscious.
Anedu’s earliest exposure to art was through the Catholic church. He was moved by the indulgent artistry of Biblical tableaux, emotive iconography and opulent mass. He later became aware of the intimate relationship between the advancement of doctrine and the proliferation of (religious) icons and questioned how much free agency is given to them.
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Edozie Anedu - Platform from Unit London on Vimeo.
In Allegory, Anedu sets out to dissect and disrupt unexamined beliefs, and hold a mirror to the circuitry of social norms to reveal its distorted shadows.
In a series of high-energy tableau vivant paintings, the exhibition revisits scenarios from Anedu’s childhood and borrows from popular culture to set a provocative visual stage. Drawing inspiration from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, each tableau serves as a contemporary cave, upon whose walls we are called to self-reflect, as the artist inserts symbolic absurdities aimed to draw us in and make us think.
His heavily layered, childlike strokes bear witness to Anedu’s personal practice of fine-tuning his own perspectives. As he revisits his lines and prolific colours, perfecting their expressive form through trial and error, the materialised painting itself is a testament to the rewarding labour of self-inquiry.
Edozie Anedu
Hold the Fort for I am Coming
2021
Edozie Anedu
Onuigbo in London
2021
Edozie Anedu
Incoming Deja Vu
2021
Edozie Anedu
Les Comédiens, Live Performance
2021
Edozie Anedu
These Are Not the Last Days, They Are the Latest
2021
Edozie Anedu
We Fly to Thy Patronage
2021
About the Artist
Edozie Anedu is a self-taught artist based in Benin City, Nigeria.
Working primarily with oils, acrylics, pastels and recycled materials, Anedu’s paintings employ elemental forms and figures that verge on the abstract. He references graffiti and mural art traditions to focus his work on popular culture, music and fashion, socio political ideologies and the human condition. Drawing from personal experience, his unflinching use of colour and often aggressive brush strokes express a freedom of emotion that commands the attention. His childlike and seemingly haphazard strokes are in conversation with his own coming of age story – a journey of excitement, adjustments and hopeful rush to the future. His work embraces a synthesis of innocence, trial and error, memory and melancholy.
Chosen Charity
