The December Art Diary takes us to Washington DC, New York, London and Bangkok. An exhibition of prints by Bruce Onobrakpeya also spotlights Nigerian artists exploring faith and spirituality through the lens of African heritage and mythology. A rare opportunity to see Romare Bearden’s ‘Paris Blues/Jazz’ series of collages also takes us to Paris, New Orleans, and Harlem. ‘Es Devlin – Face to Face: 50 Encounters with Strangers’ creates awareness of the conflicts from which refugees seek sanctuary, while the fourth Bangkok Art Biennale draws inspiration from Mother Earth as a nurturer and giver of life across cultures. Finally, Alexander de Cadenet’s ‘World Domination Burgers’ satirises the excesses of conspicuous consumption while ‘Carved & Cast’ presents a compelling survey of sculpture through the ages.
Considered one of the fathers of postcolonial Nigerian modernism, Bruce Onobrakpeya is one of Nigeria’s most recognised artists. Though trained as a painter at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in Zaria, his postgraduate participation in Mbari Club printmaking workshops in Ibadan and Osogbo, in 1963 and 1964, respectively, proved decisive for his career as he contributed illustrations to poetry volumes and novels of national significance.
He began creating works depicting Christian iconography in 1966 when Catholic priests petitioned him to interpret the Passion of Christ. The resulting body of work, ‘Fourteen Stations of the Cross’, was well received, and Onobrakpeya continued to produce relief, print, and mural commissions for Catholic priests and parishes through 1978.
“Bruce Onobrakpeya: The Mask and the Cross” at The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art is grounded in the foundational bodies of work that helped launch and secure the artist’s long and esteemed career. These include extremely rare artist’s proofs for the children’s educational text ‘May Your Kingdom Come’, which Onobrakpeya illustrated in 1968, as well as a complete narrative series of prints of ‘Fourteen Stations of the Cross’ produced in 1969. To recognise Onobrakpeya’s legacy —inspiring generations of visual artists in Nigeria — these are set alongside artworks from the museum’s collection that reflect Onobrakpeya’s influence.
Guest curator Janine Gaëlle Dieudji says the exhibition: “not only celebrates the outstanding career of the esteemed artist Dr Bruce Onobrakpeya, who was the honoree at the National Museum of African Art’s 50th anniversary but also represents global Africa through the lens of spirituality. The works of artists, whose printmaking practices significantly shaped and advanced contemporary art in Nigeria in the 1960s, further enrich this narrative.” Onobrakpeya’s prints blend references to West African tradition, folklore, and cosmology with Catholic motifs and stories from the Bible. His contemporaries also explored faith and spirituality through the lens of African heritage and mythology.
In his linocuts, Rufus Ogundele blends his Christian upbringing under the Anglican Christ Mission Society with traditional West African culture, particularly imagery of the Yoruba god of iron Ogun. The result was a hybrid illustration of Christian stories and Nigerian aesthetics. The themes of Adebisi Fabunmi prints relate to traditional Yoruba life. Fabunmi divides and subdivides his compositions, filling every inch of space with patterns. Yinka Adeyemi produces large, multicoloured batiks dyed in strong red, yellow and magenta, where the texture of pattern and shape crowd the space to create a compact unity. Though born in Ghana, Oluwole Olayemi is the son of parents from Oyan, near Osogbo in Nigeria, and is known for his style in which he outlines his forms like a stained-glass window. A native of Sabongida Ora in Edo State, Nigerian modernist Solomon Irein Wangboje was one of the earliest graduates of the Zaria Art Department and denotes the beginnings of the institution. He became an accomplished woodcut artist and a pioneer of contemporary printmaking, with works noted for their rich colours and bold lines. His woodcuts illustrate popular books on Nigerian art folklore and myth.
John K. Lapiana, interim director of the National Museum of African Art, says, “Seeing Bruce Onobrakpeya’s works in dialogue with his peers reveals the conversational nature of artistic practice—in Nigeria, on the African continent and broadly across time and geographies.” Onobrakpeya was a founding member of the famed Zaria Art Society—an art collective that developed the natural synthesis philosophy and art practice, which merged traditional Nigerian forms with European techniques, an exercise in cultural resiliency that reclaimed Nigerian aesthetic values without discarding outside influences in the early postcolonial period.
Blending Christian iconography, Nigerian folklore and West African traditions, Onobrakpeya’s art interprets spiritualism through a global lens. Biblical stories are presented with Nigerian characters and environments, such as the “Passion of Christ”, depicting Roman soldiers in British military uniforms and Jesus in Nigerian robes. In an interview with Lauren Tate Baeza, the Fred and Rita Richman Curator of African Art at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Onobrakpeya said he intended to “bring out what Christ means to our people in a way they can understand.” He synthesised Western influences with traditional African cultures, helping redefine artistic traditions in postcolonial Nigeria.
Romare Bearden is renowned for his collages and photomontages, a technique he began experimenting with in the 1950s. He considered his improvisational approach to his practice akin to jazz and blues composers. ‘Romare Bearden: Paris Blues/Jazz and Other Works’ brings to light his series known as ‘Paris Blues’, or ‘Jazz’, created in 1981. Exhibited at DC Moore in New York in a rare opportunity to view the series of 19 collages, ‘Paris Blues/Jazz’ makes a major statement on the relationships between visual art, jazz music, and urban spaces.
The series draws on the period in 1950, when Bearden moved to Paris for seven months, studying at La Sorbonne on the GI Bill and socialising with the many other artists, writers, and intellectuals who flocked to the city in the postwar years. Although Bearden was an exhibiting artist from the 1940s onwards, he has yet to be known to have created artwork during his time in Paris. Then, he was more interested in absorbing Parisian culture, including art exhibitions, jazz played at the circus and clubs, and heady conversations with artists and writers in cafes. Following his reluctant return to New York, Bearden diverted his attention to writing jazz songs, only taking up painting again in earnest in 1955.
Bearden’s ‘Paris Blues/Jazz’ series moves through Paris, New Orleans, and Harlem, mapping jazz onto city spaces and telling a story of artistic freedom and identity as found in those locations. Depicting iconic jazz singers, musicians, and clubs, Bearden also looks to the city streets and infrastructure and its inhabitants, which were vital sources of jazz music. These collages, which author Robert O’Meally calls “expressions of unruly Black cosmopolitanism,” celebrate spaces where Black people and Black culture could assert artistic and political freedom.
The geography mapped out by Bearden in the ‘Paris Blues/Jazz’ series and elsewhere suggests an alternate way of thinking about movement, a navigation of identity across borders. In Bearden’s work, influence moves in all directions, embracing multiplicity, quotation, blank space, and assemblage. In drawing out these relationships between cities, jazz, and visual art, he shows us that they are, in fact, inseparable; as O’Meally writes, Bearden is “seeking not merely to paint about jazz but to paint jazz.” He does so by translating the patterns and rhythms of jazz into visual compositions, the medium of collage paralleling its improvisational and collaborative nature.
Also included in the exhibition are individual works from across Bearden’s career, which led the way to or expanded upon the ‘Paris Blues/Jazz’ project. This exhibition showcases several of Bearden’s earliest collages from the mid-1950s on the theme of performers, clowns, and harlequins. In this same period, Bearden began an intense study of classical Chinese painting and calligraphy, leading to major abstract paintings such as ‘Heart of Autumn’. In these abstracts, Bearden began experimenting with texture, dissonance, rhythm, and interval, leading the artist to his improvisational collage practice.
In 1964, responding to the Civil Rights Movement, Bearden returned to figurative art, creating collages on themes important to Black life and beginning his celebrated ‘Projections’ series––photostat enlargements of collages. This exhibition includes the photostat, ‘Train Whistle Blues No. 1’, an early visual exploration of jazz music. Throughout the rest of his career, Bearden continued to experiment with collage in the mode of a jazz player, assembling fragmented and layered images into startling and innovative compositions.
At the Museum of Modern Art, NY, there is currently a one-room installation of Bearden’s work from their collection and archival materials from his 1971 MoMA retrospective, while his 1979 series of twenty-one collages, ‘Bayou Fever’, is currently included in the exhibition ‘Edges of Ailey’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art. A fascinating essay contrasting the work of Georges Rouault and Bearden can be found in the recently published ‘A Prophet in the Darkness; Exploring Theology in the Art of Georges Rouault’. In this essay, James Romaine looks at Bearden’s religious works, finding numerous parallels between both artists, including moral purpose, artistic methods, and subject matter. Most fundamentally, Romaine identifies an aesthetics of empathy in the work of both artists.
A similar aesthetic can also be found in a new exhibition at Somerset House, which has been curated by Ekow Eshun and is by acclaimed artist and stage designer Es Devlin. The show unfolds across three spaces: Visitors first enter a replica of Es Devlin’s south London studio, full of 50 chalk and charcoal portraits in progress. The second room presents a new edition of her projection-mapped ‘Congregation’ installation, first shown at St Mary Le Strand in October. The third room contains a series of new works, including painted LED screens and projection-mapped painted glass layered portraits.
Over a period of four months, 50 strangers arrived, one by one, at Devlin’s studio in south London. She knew only their first name and that they sought refuge in London at some point in their life. She made chalk and charcoal portraits of each participant, carrying out the first 45 minutes of the drawing session without talking and without any knowledge of her sitter/co-author’s story or circumstances. After 45 minutes, the drawing was paused while the co-author told Devlin their story. She then resumed the drawing and completed the work while listening to podcasts about the conflict from which her sitter sought sanctuary.
The recreation of Devlin’s studio includes footage of the portraits being drawn as well as notes, sketches, books, research materials, painted studies, and a short film about the making of the work. In the second room, the drawings are presented as a projection-mapped tiered structure similar to the one shown at St Mary Le Strand church. The sound installation, by Polyphonia, includes poetry by the Kinshasa-born poet JJ Bola, as well as the voices of many of the other co-authors. The score includes fragments of Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, the soundtrack to the drawing sessions. It culminates in a reworking of Anton Bruckner’s sacred motet ‘Locus Iste’ (This Place), which fuses the voices of the London Bulgarian Choir, The South African Cultural Gospel Choir UK, Genesis Sixteen and The Choir of King’s College London. The final room introduces a series of new works, including a painted plasma TV and projection-mapped layers of painted glass over chalk and charcoal portraits.
Devlin says: “I began each portrait without knowing my sitter/co-author’s story. For the first forty-five minutes, I was drawing not only a portrait of a stranger but also a portrait of the assumptions I inevitably overlay: I was drawing my own perspectives and biases. I was trying to draw in order to better perceive and understand the structures of separation, the architectures of otherness that I suspect may stand between us and the porosity to others that we are capable of feeling when these structures soften.”
The exhibition is a collaboration with The Courtauld, King’s College London, and the UK for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. More information about each co-author and the conflicts from which they seek sanctuary, along with an essay by Ekow Eshun about the work, can be found at www.unrefugees.org.uk/esdevlin-congregation.
The fourth Bangkok Art Biennale, ‘Nurture Gaia,’ will bring 76 leading international artists to Southeast Asia across eleven city-wide venues. The Biennale spotlights Southeast Asia’s vibrant art scene while bringing diverse international perspectives to the continent. The various host locations include ancient heritage sites such as Wat Pho: Temple of the Reclining Buddha, Wat Arun, Wat Bowon, and Wat Prayoon, as well as prominent institutions and galleries like the National Gallery of Thailand and Siwamokhaphiman Hall at the National Museum Bangkok.
The theme ‘Nurture Gaia’ draws inspiration from Mother Earth as a maternal figure, symbolising her role as a nurturer and giver of life across cultures. The Biennale, therefore, focuses on pressing global issues such as climate change, environmental stewardship, and humanity’s responsibility to protect the Earth. It resonates deeply within the Southeast Asian context and contributes to the broader global conversation about ecological challenges. This Biennale explores vital contemporary themes like anthropology, collectivism, feminism, and the complex politics of identity, using art as a medium to examine our relationship with nature and the interconnectedness of human actions and the planet’s well-being.
Programme highlights include a variety of artworks, such as performance and costume installation by Mella Jaarsma (The Netherlands / Indonesia), that explores the urgency of disappearing knowledge and the tension between contemporary art and tradition; Pokchat Worasub (Thailand) explores ethnic identity and marginality through photography; Agi Haines (UK) offers a provocative glimpse into the future of human adaptation, exploring the profound implications of potential body modifications designed to tackle emerging challenges; Adel Abdessemed (Algeria / France) showcases a large-scale installation exploring the interconnectedness of mother and child; Mutmee Pimdao Panichsamai (Thailand) has created a new video work exploring the human mind and society using movement, lighting, and theatricality; Gimhongsok (South Korea) presents a new body of work, that consists of sculptural installations addressing the subject of labour conditions; and major sculptures by renowned artists Anish Kapoor (UK) and Tony Cragg (UK) are displayed at One Bangkok as part of the Biennale before then remaining permanently.
The Biennale’s theme reflects a growing realisation that humanity, as an integral part of Earth, is facing critical challenges such as climate change, pandemics, war, and environmental destruction caused by ourselves. The ‘Gaia Hypothesis’ proposes that the Earth functions like a living organism that supports life across organic and inorganic matter. In light of the difficulties faced at COP29, where divides between rich and poor became ever more apparent, the focus of the Bangkok Art Biennale on Mother Nature herself is one that urgently needs heeding by the richer nations in our world.
Alexander de Cadenet is an artist who questions “the value of worldly endeavour”, and ‘World Domination’ is a series of new sculptures made in bronze and silver that explore art’s special facility to exalt and celebrate power and status. In his new “World Domination Burgers” series of humorous sculptures, de Cadenet explores society’s obsession with power and status, blending classical heroic forms with contemporary symbols of excess. Works like “Trump Burger” and “World Domination Burger” satirise the traditional equestrian monuments, questioning who and what we choose to honour—and whether these values reflect or distort our ideals. Other sculptures in the series, such as “The Artist as Sovereign”, offer a comical exploration of the role of the artist as a jester.
De Cadenet’s ‘Life-Burger’ sculptures explore the relationship between the spiritual dimension of art and consumerism and, at their root, are an exploration of what gives life meaning. Edward Lucie-Smith wrote of them, “The Life-Burgers offer a sharp critique of the society we live in and yet simultaneously they are luxury objects in their own right”. L.A. art critic Peter Frank wrote: “We’re at a moment in modern history where the excess has gotten staggeringly wretched. Oligarchs worldwide shock us and shame themselves with their conspicuous consumption — a consumption that extends to the rest of us, as consumed no less than as consumers. Alexander de Cadenet encapsulates this emerging neo-feudal order in his gilded and multi-decked burgers.”
‘Carved & Cast: Sculpture Through the Ages’ is an exhibition which aims to highlight divergent attitudes and approaches towards sculptural practice, and present a compelling survey of how some of the greatest artists of the last two centuries have shaped and redefined the medium. The exhibition has been curated by Virginia Damtsa, who remarked, “this exhibition is not just a showcase of some of sculpture’s greatest masters, but a dialogue of how the medium has been utilised to explore the complexities and depth of human existence, letting every part of the body speak for the whole.”
From masterpieces of the ancient world, including a c.3rd-1st century BC limestone mask and Roman bronze lion head dating to c.1st-2nd century AD, to contemporary works by Damien Hirst and Emily Young, the show provides an extraordinary glimpse into how sculptors have engaged with the human form and condition throughout history. Highlights include a hand-carved marble statue by Auguste Rodin, who is widely regarded as “the father of modern sculpture”, and a seminal unique granite by Jacques Lipchitz that was exhibited in the inaugural Guggenheim Museum show in New York. Two bronze sculptures by Edgar Degas are a testament to his lifelong fascination with movement and the human form. Best known for his portrayals of ballet dancers, Degas masterfully captured the grace and dynamism of the human body in motion against the coarse roughness of bronze, which reveals the intense labour and effort involved in ballet.
In the lower gallery, visitors are initially immersed in a dark room of monumental, vertical forms by Sorel Etrog, Emily Young, and Giacomo Manzú. Towards the back of the room, ‘La Grande Chiave’ by Manzú dominates the space and is flanked by two of his smaller cardinal sculptures. The origin of the cardinal in his oeuvre stems from a long-held fascination with liturgical vestments, their almost conical forms, and a resulting sense of monumentality and, indeed, serenity that they emanated. Curtis Bill Pepper’s ‘An Artist and the Pope’ documented Manzù’s sacred commissions and is a fascinating expose of the difficulties encountered, even at the very heart of the Roman Catholic Church and despite the significant support of Pope John XXIII. Manzù and Pope John “both came from Bergamo in Italy, but there the affinity seemed to halt, for one was the beloved Pope John XXIII and the other, a Communist bereft of his religious faith, was the famous sculptor Giacomo Manzù. Yet Pope John, discerning the man beyond the atheist, commissioned Manzù to make his portrait bust, and despite all the artist’s misgivings, there developed between them a warm and deeply significant friendship which drove Manzù to achieve the remarkable bronze Doors of Death for St. Peter’s in Rome – the first new doors for the cathedral for 500 years.”
A selection of smaller sculptures by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Man Ray conclude the show. While Moore’s practice remained rooted in his study of the human body, Hepworth became intimately connected with the Cornish coast, the crashing of the sea waves, and the natural forms of the landscape’s rocks. Man Ray’s ‘Les Mains Libres’ originate from a set of drawings he produced in the 1930s, capturing the essence of his Surrealist interests in the irrational, desire, and freedom.
‘Bruce Onobrakpeya: The Mask and the Cross’, 21 June 2024 – 17 January 2025, National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC – Visit Here
‘Romare Bearden: Paris Blues/Jazz and Other Works’, 14 November 2024 – 11 January 2025, DC Moore Gallery, New York – Visit Here
‘Es Devlin – Face to Face: 50 Encounters with Strangers’, 23 November 2024 – 12 January 2025 Somerset House – Visit Here
‘Nurture Gaia’, 24 October 2024 – 25 February 2025, Bangkok Art Biennale, eleven city-wide venues – Visit Here
‘World Domination Burgers’, from 12 December 2024, Andipa Gallery –
‘Carved & Cast: Sculpture Through the Ages’, 18 November 2024 – 28 March 2025, Alon Zakaim Fine Art – Visit Here
Lead image: Choi Jeong Hwa, Breathing, 2018-2024. Waterproof fabric and motor. Dimensions variable. Photo by centralwOrld