Asidere, Ogunwo’s ‘Ashes and Gestures’ exhibition holds at Kokopelli Gallery July 20

By Editor

KOKOPELLI Gallery will feature Ashes and Gestures: The Impasto Syndrome, a landmark exhibition featuring two master painters of impasto: Duke Asidere and Bolaji Ogunwo. The exhibition is a meditation on presence and trace, on what is left behind and what insists on being seen. The exhibition will run from 20th July 20th to August 23, 2025 at Kokopelli Gallery, 17 Ademola Street, Ikoyi, Lagos.

In most studios, the dried remnants of colour and the crusted edges of the palette are discarded without thought. But for Asidere and Ogunwo, these ashes are reclaimed. Folded back into the canvas, and they become texture, memory, and meaning. Ashes and Gestures: an Impasto Syndrome brings together two masterful painters whose practices reveal the emotional and material thickness of contemporary Nigerian painting. Asidere’s charged gestures emerge from a place of immediacy; raw, political, and deeply personal. Ogunwo’s works, by contrast, are lyrical and meditative, luminous colour work, drawing from memory and metaphysical rhythm.

Rather than seeking resolution, this exhibition stages a dialogue of difference, a textured conversation between two temperaments, two modes of mark-making, two approaches to survival. It reminds us that painting is not merely image, but archive, ritual and resistance. That even what dries and is cast aside can return: not as waste, but as witness.

Kokopelli Gallery is a modern and contemporary Art gallery dedicated to showcasing ingenious artists who have mastered the art of storytelling. Established in 2021, the gallery is presenting platforms for creatives who engage in the line with intentions to foster a tradition and dialogue of storytelling. A multi-roomed setting with a space dedicated for meditation. The Grotto is an immersive space that interprets literally a roomful of stories. The gallery has proven to be an experimental space with an extemporaneous approach to the evolution of the Art space where raconteurs and aesthetes converge for related engagements.

Asidere spoke about ‘Ashes and Gestures’ exhibition and why it’s technic-based one and not theme-based, and showing alongside a young artist, Bolaji Ogunwo. He noted that a few of his works explore some troubling issues within the African cultural space, hinting at a reordering of the global art landscape or at least the reorientation of African artists to believe and wean themselves from the need to seek validation from the global North.

According to Asidere, “The gallery (Kokopelli) is interested in showing works based on technic really, and I’m essential one who enjoys texture, what they call ‘impasto’; I like my work to be felt. Two of the works I’ve shown before, one is ‘A Thousand Stories’ and the other has to do with greed. What stands out is that it’s a technic-driven exhibition, and not theme-driven.

“I’m showing with a young artist, probably in his 40s. For me it’s being kind to somebody who’s kind to me; normally I rarely do those kind of shows. I agreed with the gallery owner who’s a calm person, and I said why not?”

Asidere expressed concern that Africans were usually made to be spectators in global conversations about Africa, with speakers anything but Africans, with the painful result that the Africa they talk about is anything but the one he lives in and knows.

“I have five works showing in this exhibition,” he said. “Only two of the works have never been exhibited. The one that is very political is the one about Africa is the one I always ask: when they discuss Africa, Africa does not talk about Africa! When they’re talking about African art, African music, Afrucans are never there. All the time, they make Africans observers in what should be theirs. So, it’s a critique of that, but I’ve not pushed the body of work to the number needed for exhibition. I just said let me show one of such works. It’s a conversation piece, but the persons you’re holding the conversation with are never there.

“When they talk about Africa, it’s persons in diaspora who talk about Africa; when they talk about AFrica globally, they don’t bring people who are in Nigeria, who are in Surulere, who are in Ojuelegba, in Lokoja to talk about Africa. They bring a guy who’s lived 40 years in London. So he comes with his London idea of Africa. And you’re asking yourself as a listener, is that my Africa he’s talking about? He’s clearly lost touch with reality.”

Asidere called on African artists to believe in themselves and not always pander to Europe’s approval ratings or validation, saying it’s a mentality still steeped in colonial fixation that they must wean themselves from. Asidere’s charge speaks to the need to create structures of arts in Africa that should give agency to African creatives and their cultural offerings that should not require outsider validations.

“Then another thing my work talks about is that as an artist is: why do you need to go to Europe and America to prove a point? It’s the heaviness of colonialism still prevalent. Oyibo artist who’s 23 doesn’t need to come to Nigeria to become a star; he doesn’t need to step his feet in Africa at all. But you’d see a 60 years’ old Nigerian artist struggling to go for a residency in New York. He’s not going to post in his CV that he went to Ozoro or Ellu. It’s the resistance of global art. Global art is nothing!”

For more information, contact: abisade@kokopelliafrica.com/gallery@kokopelliafrica.com/www.kokopelliafrica.com/www.instagram.com/thekokopelligallery