Odyssey: A journey into an artist’s realm

Abiodun Olaku is no doubt one of the grandmasters of fine arts in Nigeria, leveraging art to tell stories about contemporary societal issues and promoting the intuitive artistic skills to encourage the young and the up-and-coming artists.

At the National Museum in Lagos, his works of art were displayed at an exhibition which attracted hundreds of art enthusiasts and lovers of fine arts.

From paintings to drawings, the exhibition took the participants into what the curator, Prof. Jerry Buhari, called, the “retrospective” of Abiodun Olaku’s works.

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Paintings as old as 1988 were on display blended with the 2024 works to take the visitors through the remarkable transformation of the artist as a grandmaster.

From the “Passage of Hope Series” 2023 based on oil on canvas to “Matters Arising” (2021) on oil on paperboard; “The Emissary” (Durbar series, 2022) which was a pen and ink drawing and wash on paper; to “WS-The Humanist, the Influencer”, a 2021 drawing of Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, as well as “Modinat” (1999), a charcoal on cartridge paper, among others, the artist did not mince words about his love for fine arts as shown at the exhibition with over 60 works on display.

According to the curator, Professor Buhari, a teacher of Fine Arts at the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, “Spanning over four decades, his works assume a spiritual “Odyssey” when his portraits, landscapes, waterscapes, sunsets, sunrise, crowd compositions and fascination with masquerades define his story.”

Buhari said, “In the works selected for this retrospective, and because it is over two decades since he presented a solo show, we decided to go back as far as when he made his first sketches in the early seventies.

“These drawings are the defining artistic laboratories, sources, and roots of Abiodun Olaku’s art practice. They symbolise his deep interest in the human condition as he has eloquently expressed in these visual narratives titled “Odyssey…”

Narrating further the concept of the Odyssey, Buhari said, “This exhibition has a long story. It started in the COVID year of 2020, the month of May, when the sponsor shared his desire to do a solo show for Abiodun Olaku. Incidentally, he’s been following Olaku’s work for quite a period of time and has also collected a few of his works.

“One of his attractions to exhibiting was that he found the artist had not exhibited in over 20 years. And with such a status, he wondered why a guy with such a consistent history of practice had not been exhibited.

“So they got talking, and that’s how I was appointed to curate the exhibition. So we started discussing what would be the focus or the thrust of the exhibition. And it was very obvious that because it’s been a long time since they had the exhibition, why don’t we look at the concept of the story, Odyssey, journey?

“And that’s how the Odyssey came up as a theme for the exhibition. So what you have today here in summary is a story that is made up of four stories – The drawings. We decided to go as far back as when he began to take art seriously. That was when he went into school in 1977. There are some drawings, you see, that are 1976. So we have work until 2024. So that gives you, if you like, a holistic glimpse into the artist’s world.

“Now, the other thing that is quite interesting for me as a curator is the way in which, either consciously or unconsciously, there is a mirroring of the national image of the country. He does works of the Igbo man. He does northern vernacular architecture, paintings of northern vernacular architecture, and bounces off with the western world.

“So you will see in this exhibition an attempt to capture the rich history of Nigerian culture. In the landscapes and the people, you see portraitures of northerners, portraitures of southerners, landscapes of the north, landscapes of the south, people of the north, people of the southeast.”

He stated that 66 works were on display, including the works that are for sale, the works deliberately selected for the exhibition, works of his artistic journey in drawings. According to him, drawing is sine qua non to any artist’s life. “So we thought; let’s show his drawing and life painting which is a major course in any artist’s school,” he said.

The artist, Abiodun Olaku, in a chat with our correspondent said the Odyssey is “synonymous with journey.”

He said, “So it is reflective of my foray in art, starting from my years of innocence through other experiences to the period of consciousness, you know, when I could just draw intuitively, innocently without knowing what was behind it to when I took the step to go and acquire more certified knowledge through school, graduated and started doing things with that knowledge.

“So that’s what the journey is all about. It’s important to me because a few things seem to have changed from when I started out. The pace has quickened. You know, young artists work with more frenzy today as against our own old school tempered approach, you know, and these are things we took from the seniors, the masters, the pioneers, the pace setters for us, who taught us, inspired us and mentored us.”

‘Poised to bring back the art’

In Odyssey, Olaku also hinted on the mission of reviving the art and boosting the growth trajectory given that “contemporary art in Nigeria is not that old, you can just trace it back to probably less than about 100 years.”

He listed the likes of the late Aina Onabolu, Akinola Lasekan, Yusuf Grillo, among others who contributed to modernism in art.

He said, “I’m a product of Yaba College of Tech, passing through Professor Grillo, Doctor Kolade Oshinowo, late Isiaka Osunde and others. And we were told that it was an organic process. You go from one stage of development to the other, but those things don’t seem to happen today. And I just said, okay, I need to bring out more facts, more data about me as an artist, because you can see the name is out there.

“But a lot of people probably do not know a lot about my past. So I said, well, having spent about 40 years plus, these are about 43 years now, post-graduation, I’ve been there. Let me share my experience with the younger ones so that they can see that it took us time. We didn’t get here by night bus. So we have on display work coming from preschool. That was my teenage years, when I was building to go into school, some of my schoolwork and when I just finished.”

‘Exhortation for the younger ones’

He said the younger practitioners of Fine Arts need to calm down and strive to pass through the organic stages of development.

“If it’s a calling, it’s supposed to be for life. So you’re going to pass through many stages, have a lot of experiences along the way. So take your time, enjoy the process to develop organically, you know, from innocence, you know, the useful exuberance, then later to become a master.

“Everything is time bound and, you know, it’s also a journey of self-discovery, and that’s not going to happen suddenly. It’s not going to happen, you know, at the snap of a finger. So if everything is going to be time bound, like I said, if it’s a calling, it is for life. So let time help you out, you know, to unfold slowly,” he added.