Enwonwu’s Yoruba Woman In Blue hits £686,200 at Bonhams’ auction

Yoruba Woman in Blue, oil on canvas, by Benedict Chukwukadibia Enwonwu, which is considered a monumental work in the artist’s oeuvre, sold for £686,200, smashing its initial estimate of £250,000-350,000 at Bonhams’ Modern and Contemporary African Art sale on October 12, where over N1.6 billion (£1.5 million) worth of Nigerian art was successfully sold.

With an artistic career that spanned nearly 60 years, Enwonwu is considered one of the most prominent modern African artists.

Yoruba Woman in Blue exemplifies Enwonwu’s exploration of femininity, a popular theme in his practice during the early 1970s.

Depicting a Yoruba woman in profile, the work incorporates the artist’s formal training in Western portraiture with his traditional Igbo philosophical tropes, which champions women in the community as pillars of society.

Engaging the female subject and an exploration of femininity was a popular thematic practice for him in the early 1970s and could be seen in the work.

This theme also resonates in the Tutu series whose subject has been precisely concluded as depicting Princess Adetutu Ademiluyi.

The work draws many parallels to some of the artist’s most beautiful and successful works to sell at auction, namely the Tutu series.

These parallels distinguish this iconic portrait as a work of art that should be held with the highest regard within the artist’s highly distinguished career.

A long-lost masterpiece, Tutu sold for £1.2 million (N1.1 billion) at “Africa Now,” the first-ever evening sale of contemporary African art at Bonhams London. Hammered down to an anonymous phone bidder after a 20-minute bidding war, it is the most expensive Nigerian modernist work ever sold at auction.

Group Head of Fine Art, Giles Peppiatt, commented: “After setting world auction records for works by Enwonwu in 2017 and 2018, we’re pleased to continue to produce strong results for the artist. Yoruba Women in Blue is emblematic of Ben Enwonwu’s pioneering style and after fierce bidding to secure ownership of the work, we’re proud to see such sustained interest in his work here in the UK.”

Several world auction records were broken at the sale, including for Nnenna Okore, whose Ashjoke achieved £26,880 against an estimate of £8,000-12,000, as well as Lamidi Toto, whose Vessel achieved £11,520 against an estimate of £4,000-6,000. Toto’s stoneware was part of a larger selection of Abuja ceramics featured in the sale, highlighting the women.