In a series of exquisite 11 portraits, Tunde Owolabi, in his first show with Soto Gallery, is considering the pervasiveness of ‘informal work’ alongside the increasing marginalisation informal workers face in the country today.
Presenting To Hold a Gaze: Lives & Stories in the Informal Economy, the exhibition opens to the general public from July 2 to 16.
Owolabi is a full-time studio artist whose practice spans painting, photography, textile and graphic design. Under the tutelage of the late Professor Abayomi Barber, he began painting professionally in the early 2000s, after graduating from Yaba College of Technology with a degree in Graphic Design.
Alongside his work as a painter, he is the founder and Creative Director of Ethnik Afrika, a multidisciplinary Afrocentric design and photography studio based in Lagos.
As a designer, his works are diverse, exploring different materials, especially the woven fabric Aso-Oke. As a textile designer, his goal is to tell the African story through patterns and colour.
As the title suggests, Owolabi believes that key to understanding the contradiction between apparent ubiquity on the one hand and conditional visibility on the other lies, in part at least, on what a society, and the individuals who shape it, decide is worthy of close and prolonged regard, on what it allows to linger in its line of sight.
The people who look back in these portraits, with few alterations are drawn from life, positioned, in the process of plying their trades, exactly as the artist met them. These chance encounters were central to the development of the project as they offered Owolabi the chance to record both the likeness and setting of his subjects as well as an effect of compressed energy, the result of finding moments of stillness and connection in the busyness of midday Lagos.
Owolabi has participated in a few group shows including, Gods of this Age at Didi Museum, Lagos (2001); Lines and Colour at Pats Restaurant, Lagos (2001); Guinness Group Exhibition at Harlequin Gallery, Lagos (2003); Inner Thoughts at Nimbus Art Centre, Lagos, (2003) and others.
