Adegbola Gallery, in collaboration with Fresco Gallery, has opened “Asidere / Duke,” a solo exhibition by Nigerian artist Duke Asidere at 1619 Danmole Street, Victoria Island, Lagos.
The show, co-curated by Kayode Adegbola and Ima Ekpo, spans more than four decades of work in oil, graphite, watercolour, acrylic and mixed media, and includes a series of annotated clock faces that form a running commentary on Nigerian social and political life.
The exhibition takes its title from the dual identities Asidere holds as an artist: Asidere Duke, the instinctive painter driven by feeling and memory, and Duke Asidere, the formally trained craftsman. Rather than resolving that tension, the works sustain it with paintings in which emotion and technical discipline occupy the same surface, neither cancelling the other out.
Trained at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, and mentored by Professor Bruce Onobrakpeya, Asidere works by building up his canvases and then cutting back into them. Embedded within many of the painted fields are fragments of everyday material; bank cards, newspaper clippings, medical prescriptions, alongside names of friends and family written directly into the surface. The result is a record that accumulates quietly, revealing new detail on repeated encounter.
The exhibition moves across the recurring subjects of his practice: women, depicted not as portraits but as presences shaped by memory; grief, including works made following the death of a sibling; and Nigeria’s political and material failures. A painting described by a close associate as composed entirely of black shades is said to have emerged from a period of power cuts and the broader exhaustion they represent, rendered not as symbol, but as direct report.
The clock works, installed together on the rear wall of the gallery, extend this documentary impulse. Ordinary clock faces marked with observations and social commentary, some still running and others deliberately stopped, they form what the curatorial statement describes as “a collective document of the world the paintings emerge from.”
Osaro Ekomwereren, a collector and long-standing friend of the artist, whose written reflection accompanies the exhibition, said of the stopped clocks: “I believe Duke stopped certain clocks deliberately – as an acknowledgement that there are forces he cannot control, moments that are simply over. Time keeps going, and then it does not.”
Asidere has described colour as “the complete document of my thoughts,” a position evident throughout the exhibition, where shifts in palette mark changes in mood, pressure and circumstance as reliably as any written notation.
The exhibition remains open until July 18.
•Featured image courtesy Adegbola Gallery