kó
kó is an art space in Lagos, Nigeria, that is dedicated to promoting modern and contemporary art. It has a dual focus in championing Nigeria’s leading artists from the modern era and celebrating emerging and established contemporary artists across Africa and the diaspora. kó was established by Kavita Chellaram, an art collector and founder of Arthouse Contemporary in Lagos, who has been a major force in developing the modern and contemporary art market in Nigeria, and whose exhibitions and projects over the years have contributed to the global recognition of numerous modern African masters.
BISILA NOHA
Ignis II, 2022, Terracotta and Plaster, Thrown, Coiled, and Sculpted, 23 x 12 x 22 cm
Bisila Noha is a ceramic artist whose work explores overlooked craft traditions, particularly those led by women in the Global South. Her work is influenced by her Spanish and Equatorial Guinean heritage, and examines the balance between multiple identities while challenging Western views on art and craft. Her ceramics incorporate clay, plaster and bronze, and result from a practice that employs throwing, coiling and craving, processes that connect the artist to her roots and our past. Noha is a passionate feminist activist devoted to calling attention to the forgotten women who had a hand in shaping the history of pottery.
DEBORAH SEGUN
When a Fire Starts to Burn, Acryliconcancas, 160 x 140 cm
Deborah Segun is a multidisciplinary artist based in Lagos, Nigeria. Her practice adopts a playful deconstructed, reductive and loose Cubist approach to painting, incorporating fragmented and exaggerated shapes, faces and forms that delineate the female figure in contemplation or repose. Segun is less interested in detail than in the manner in which the elements of line, shape and colour operate in conjunction. The resulting works can be read as a commentary on the representation of women in art history as well as a challenge to the concept of identity and one’s ability and power to define and redefine oneself.
KWADWO ASIEDU
Harrow at Dawn, 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 61 x 91.4 cm
Kwadwo Asiedu depicts highly impressionistic landscapes with a visual language of rich, textured layers and pulsating light and colour. Asiedu examines the poetic and mysterious qualities of the natural world, channelling the idyllic to draw attention to humanity’s corrosive tendencies. This focus, however, is anything but utopic. Ebb of Agou, for example, recalls the geological marvel of the Mount of Agou, which is said to have stood as a symbol and source of refuge from invading aggressors. The works for ART X Lagos highlight the spiritual and material interdependence of humans and their environment, and serve as a plea to preserve what’s left of it.
OZIOMA ONUZULIKE
Old Honey Comb, 2023, Earthenware and stoneware clays, ash glaze and recycled glass (70 kg), 127 x 176 x 5 cm
Ozioma Onuzulike (b. 1972, Nigeria) is a ceramics artist, poet and historian of African art and design. He graduated with distinction from the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he now serves as Director of the Institute of African Studies. Onuzulike is a fellow of the Civitella Ranieri Centre, Umbertide, Italy, and his work is in the permanent collection of the University of Cambridge’s Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, Princeton University Art Museum and the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art, Lagos. His most recent solo exhibition, Ozioma Onuzulike: New Work, was at the Marc Straus Gallery, New York (2023).
STEPHEN PRICE
Sounds of Piano, 2022, Charcoal, Soft Pastels and Acrylic on Canvas, 59.9 x 59.9 cm
Price obtained a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Northampton, and his paintings offer a poetic encounter between abstraction and figuration. Using a mixed-media form that combines charcoal, pastels and acrylic on canvas, Price paints rich humanistic portraits of non-existent figures that inhabit their own timeless worlds. The physicality of texture in these works coexists with an ethereal quality that imbues them with a remarkable depth of feeling and degree of vulnerability that has seen them described as “hauntingly beautiful”. Price’s work was recently featured in the exhibition In Situ: Encounters of Place (kó Art Space, Lagos, 2022).
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