Exhibition

Blaque

Dates

10 October 2021 - 17 October 2021

Blaque is Yemi's first Solo exhibition. His bold ambition and journey into sculpture, and with the bronze medium for that matter, mirror his personality, professional orientation, and sense of direction. His creative process goes through all the rigorous processes of bronze casting using the best of Benin bronze casting tradition. He conceives and creates these works at the famous Universal Studio Iganmu, Lagos, and casts them in Benin. They are later returned to Lagos for the final finish.

This is a fascinating tale of two cities. The works themselves speak brilliantly of painstaking journeys, laborious dedication to the process with an almost perfect finish that Brancusi would approve. The figures reference the delicate nature of our current human existence as a country and by extension the fragile state of the country.

These figures reflect not only our material poverty but also the all-pervading poverty of a rich corrupt nation.

Featured Artist

Olayemi Fagbohungbe

Yemi Fagbohungbe is an architect who graduated from the premier architecture school at Ahmadu Bello University domiciled in the Faculty of Environmental Design. The departments that makeup the Faculty of Environmental are, Architecture, Building, FineArt, Geomatics, Industrial Design, Urban and Regional Planning. He believes that his experience of the rich Zaria art school brought him into a conscious appreciation of the interrelatedness of his chosen field with the visual arts. Some of his colleagues often take courses such as General drawing, and Landscape drawing as electives in the Department of Fine Art, and he has been privileged to take some architecture students in these courses.

Some of them did not only enjoy their experience but went on to expand their architectural training with artistic embellishment, thereby distinguishing their professional practice. This is no ordinary experience; because there are so many of his colleagues, even his lecturers whose relationship with art is not only remote, some even seek to deliberately distance themselves from any relationship with Fine Art. Yet we know that historically art and architecture have always had a symbiotic relationship.

It is of pleasant delight that today in Nigeria there are a number of architects who have turned into artists and creating great and fascinating works.