State-of-the-art Lagos: Young Contemporaries 2017

I’d like to first of all say Happy New Year to you, it’s a new year and the perfect time for a refresh. I am putting some life back into Hannah Remz Curation for 2017 with new reviews, new curations, new photography and new blog entries. Expect new and bigger things this year! I start this series with a review of a few art shows and venues that are bursting with culture in Lagos. For those who want to escape the hustle and bustle and see some beauty that challenges the norm and takes you out of the mundanity of it all, read on as I review Young Contemporaries 2017 at RELE Gallery in the first article of the series on the state-of-the-art in Lagos and hold on for more. There’s more to life than the club, no? If you are not in Lagos, there is still much to be anticipated from the ever growing art scene in Lagos: find out about contemporary African artists that are simply doing the most and coming up with amazing things about their perspectives of being African.

At the Young Contemporaries exhibition at Rele, I really related to the artwork of Rewa (@artbyrewa) who playfully infused pop art and colour by number-esque portraits of stylish metropolitan women. The women were manifestations of herself in the different cities that she has inhabited: London, Lagos and Johannesburg. As someone who has lived in different cities, having shuttled between London and Lagos and then moved to New York on my own, the artworks resonated with me. I understand how a city can overwhelm, can isolate, can welcome, can excite. The women in the artworks keep their beauty intact but the emotion comes across in the artworks. You can see with a mournful downturn of the head the yearning for home in the Johannesburg portraits. The tonal colouring of the visible “blues” that she was experiencing shows the unhappiness of being in a foreign city having to build community from almost scratch, being aware that being far away from the ones who you have already built relationships with makes building new ones that much more difficult. In the Lagos portraits you can see in the striped back beauty of the portraits that the women are so much more comfortable in their own skin.

Sejiro Avoseh’s artworks (@serg_carpo) at Rele, were also resoundingly deep rooted in the consciousness of self-reflection. The physiognomical series focuses on outward appearances, the way that mechanics and magazine exerts obscure the physical appearances of the subjects is a metaphor for how people put up defence mechanisms for the snap judgements and prejudices that people develop in our society. This was exceptionally executed, the series was intriguing, other worldly but still very aesthetically pleasing.

In the Young Contemporaries the quality of art was indeed state of the art: for instance artwork by Marcellina (@marcellina_oseghale) used the slightly passé medium of Ankara within the mixed media art form, but despite this the concept was inspired, and the use of Ankara in this instance was original. I have only mentioned three out of the five artists in this exhibition and it is important for me to iterate that the quality of the exhibition is outstanding. I thoroughly encourage you to check out the artists exhibiting and if you can visit the gallery.