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Lot Essay
‘I hope to give folks the same inclusion and freedom to imagine whatever spaces they want to occupy’ (Toyin Ojih Odutola)
In Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Distinguished Relation at Ejogu Gardens (Amara Palace) (2018), a bronze statue rises from a stone pedestal. Rendered in a lustrous black and green patina, the sculpture is of a handsome figure clad in flowing robes and clutching a spear, contentedly surveying the idyllic scene that surrounds it. There are towering palm trees with curving fronds and bushes with yellow and pink flowers, rendered with Impressionistic dapples. The scene is rendered in pencil, pastel and charcoal of extraordinary texture and colour, taking on the richness of paint. This large-scale picture is itself a depiction of an imagined artwork. It brings us into a paradisal parallel universe in which black Nigerian potentates enjoy the sort of cultural commemoration that Western aristocrats have claimed for millennia. The work was exhibited in Ojih Odutola’s 2018 show When Legends Die at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. This was the fifth and final instalment of a celebrated exhibition series, consisting of drawings and pastels telling the story of two fictional elite families united by a same-sex marriage—an arrangement illegal in present-day Nigeria.
Born in Ifẹ̀ in southwestern Nigeria, Ojih Odutola moved to the United States at the age of five, and lives and works in New York. When Legends Die was preceded by exhibitions at prestigious institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work now features in major collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. The British novelist Zadie Smith is among her admirers, anointing her as ‘a central light in a thrilling new generation of black artists’ (Z. Smith, ‘“What Would We Be Like If Racism Never Existed?”: Zadie Smith On The Joyful “African Utopias” Created By Artist Toyin Ojih Odutola’, Vogue, June 2018). In her radical address of historical erasure, Ojih Odutola follows in the footsteps of black figurative painters such as Kerry James Marshall. Alongside works by Marshall, her painting A Grand Inheritance (2016) was included in the acclaimed group show The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure at the National Portrait Gallery in London last year. From the same imaginative world as the present work, it incorporates a version of Marshall’s painting SOB, SOB (2003), placing his work in the fictitious collection of the UmuEze Amara family.
Ojih Odutola specialises in using traditionally graphic media—pen, pencils, pastels, charcoal—to create works of lush painterly splendour. Her early pictures used exclusively ballpoint pen, yet still have an expressiveness and emotional power redolent of Old Master drawings. The present work has the scale of a grand painted portrait. The statue’s detailed surface, gleaming in dark green and black like an ancient bronze, resembles the artist’s meticulous depictions of human figures. The overall scene has a meditative air. Ojih Odutola has drawn a masterpiece for her fictional dynasts to ponder. As Amber Jamilla Musser writes: ‘Contemplation oozes from these images, imbuing these portraits with an air of intimacy because viewers feel as though they are witnessing a private, quiet moment’ (A. J. Musser, ‘Toyin Ojih Odutola: When Legends Die’, The Brooklyn Rail, October 2018). Here we are being allowed to share in the intimate moment of beholding an artwork.
Ojih Odutola’s use of pen and pencil signals the literary dimensions of her art. For When Legends Die, she posed as the secretary to her wealthy subjects. The works in her 2020 exhibition A Countervailing Theory at London’s Barbican Centre were cast as relics of a long-lost Nigerian civilisation where women ruled over disposable male slaves, accidentally discovered by a mining group. Ojih Odutola’s storytelling acuity is influenced by Western literature and Japanese manga. Of the latter she describes ‘a brilliant rhythm in the economy of plot: every panel or scene has a specific purpose to the larger story, though it may not seem to initially. A panel of a grasshopper on a leaf, a scene of an empty house interior—that’s a world’ (T. Ojih Odutola quoted in ‘Planting a Seed: Toyin Ojih Odutola in conversation with Lotte Johnson’, in Toyin Ojih Odutola: A Countervailing Theory, exh. cat. Barbican, London 2020, p. 38). Distinguished Relation at Ejogu Gardens (Amara Palace) is both an exemplar of such narrative world-building and an exquisite, absorbing picture in its own right.
In Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Distinguished Relation at Ejogu Gardens (Amara Palace) (2018), a bronze statue rises from a stone pedestal. Rendered in a lustrous black and green patina, the sculpture is of a handsome figure clad in flowing robes and clutching a spear, contentedly surveying the idyllic scene that surrounds it. There are towering palm trees with curving fronds and bushes with yellow and pink flowers, rendered with Impressionistic dapples. The scene is rendered in pencil, pastel and charcoal of extraordinary texture and colour, taking on the richness of paint. This large-scale picture is itself a depiction of an imagined artwork. It brings us into a paradisal parallel universe in which black Nigerian potentates enjoy the sort of cultural commemoration that Western aristocrats have claimed for millennia. The work was exhibited in Ojih Odutola’s 2018 show When Legends Die at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. This was the fifth and final instalment of a celebrated exhibition series, consisting of drawings and pastels telling the story of two fictional elite families united by a same-sex marriage—an arrangement illegal in present-day Nigeria.
Born in Ifẹ̀ in southwestern Nigeria, Ojih Odutola moved to the United States at the age of five, and lives and works in New York. When Legends Die was preceded by exhibitions at prestigious institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work now features in major collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. The British novelist Zadie Smith is among her admirers, anointing her as ‘a central light in a thrilling new generation of black artists’ (Z. Smith, ‘“What Would We Be Like If Racism Never Existed?”: Zadie Smith On The Joyful “African Utopias” Created By Artist Toyin Ojih Odutola’, Vogue, June 2018). In her radical address of historical erasure, Ojih Odutola follows in the footsteps of black figurative painters such as Kerry James Marshall. Alongside works by Marshall, her painting A Grand Inheritance (2016) was included in the acclaimed group show The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure at the National Portrait Gallery in London last year. From the same imaginative world as the present work, it incorporates a version of Marshall’s painting SOB, SOB (2003), placing his work in the fictitious collection of the UmuEze Amara family.
Ojih Odutola specialises in using traditionally graphic media—pen, pencils, pastels, charcoal—to create works of lush painterly splendour. Her early pictures used exclusively ballpoint pen, yet still have an expressiveness and emotional power redolent of Old Master drawings. The present work has the scale of a grand painted portrait. The statue’s detailed surface, gleaming in dark green and black like an ancient bronze, resembles the artist’s meticulous depictions of human figures. The overall scene has a meditative air. Ojih Odutola has drawn a masterpiece for her fictional dynasts to ponder. As Amber Jamilla Musser writes: ‘Contemplation oozes from these images, imbuing these portraits with an air of intimacy because viewers feel as though they are witnessing a private, quiet moment’ (A. J. Musser, ‘Toyin Ojih Odutola: When Legends Die’, The Brooklyn Rail, October 2018). Here we are being allowed to share in the intimate moment of beholding an artwork.
Ojih Odutola’s use of pen and pencil signals the literary dimensions of her art. For When Legends Die, she posed as the secretary to her wealthy subjects. The works in her 2020 exhibition A Countervailing Theory at London’s Barbican Centre were cast as relics of a long-lost Nigerian civilisation where women ruled over disposable male slaves, accidentally discovered by a mining group. Ojih Odutola’s storytelling acuity is influenced by Western literature and Japanese manga. Of the latter she describes ‘a brilliant rhythm in the economy of plot: every panel or scene has a specific purpose to the larger story, though it may not seem to initially. A panel of a grasshopper on a leaf, a scene of an empty house interior—that’s a world’ (T. Ojih Odutola quoted in ‘Planting a Seed: Toyin Ojih Odutola in conversation with Lotte Johnson’, in Toyin Ojih Odutola: A Countervailing Theory, exh. cat. Barbican, London 2020, p. 38). Distinguished Relation at Ejogu Gardens (Amara Palace) is both an exemplar of such narrative world-building and an exquisite, absorbing picture in its own right.