At DADA Gallery in Ikoyi, Lagos, seven Nigerian artists are being placed in conversation across generations and ways of seeing. Crosscurrents and Affinities runs from September 13 to October 31, 2026. Its strongest idea is not that the artists share one style. It is that their work can meet across Yoruba visual traditions, Igbo cosmology, memory, landscape and the pressures of ordinary city life.
The exhibition brings together Nike Davies-Okundaye, Kelechi Chinwendu, Chigozie Obi, Abiodun Olaku, Ayotunde Ojo, Kainebi Osahenye and Kadara Enyeasi. The gallery describes the show as a cross-generational dialogue between master and emerging artists. That framework gives visitors permission to look for connections without flattening differences. A shared room does not make every work say the same thing.
Tradition is active, not frozen
Davies-Okundaye, a fifth-generation Adire artist and weaver, presents work with Tola Wewe, including In This Together, created in 2020. The gallery describes patterns from Yoruba visual culture and Adire motifs as part of the painting's language. Those patterns do more than decorate a surface. They connect family, womanhood and mythology to a practice carried through generations, while remaining part of contemporary painting.
Chinwendu's Pathways to the Unknown works turn toward Igbo cosmology. In the paired paintings When Ala Lived Above and How She Came Below, the earth deity Ala becomes a way to think about origin, care and the relationship between the human body and the world. The gallery's description draws attention to a worldview in which women and creation are linked. The work uses fantastical imagery, but it also carries an argument about who has been allowed to represent the sacred and the body.
The city enters the gallery
Chigozie Obi's Dreamscape series moves from cultural inheritance into personal memory, using images of a galaxy to think about loss, recovery and the future a person imagines for herself. Abiodun Olaku looks outward at urban neglect. In the Oke Igbala works, the gallery says, a refuse site becomes a landscape of waste, smoke and people searching through it. The scene is difficult because it turns a familiar city problem into something viewers have to look at closely.
Ayotunde Ojo's domestic interiors offer another register. Household objects, people and small routines become a record of how a room absorbs the memory of the people living in it. Kainebi Osahenye and Kadara Enyeasi add further approaches to protest, sleep, imagination and the body. The exhibition's range is part of its point: Nigerian art does not need to choose between heritage and the present, or between beauty and difficult subjects.
There is a practical question for Lagos audiences, too. A show about public culture needs people to see it. Galleries can make a path into the room through clear interpretation, accessible opening hours and conversations that welcome visitors who do not arrive with art-market vocabulary. Crosscurrents and Affinities offers a timely invitation: look carefully at how each artist makes a world, then notice where those worlds touch the life of the city outside the gallery.
The exhibition closes on October 31 at DADA Gallery, 49 Norman Williams Street, Ikoyi. The final days are a chance to see the works together rather than only through individual images online.
Sources
- DADA Gallery overview and exhibition dates
- Exhibition works and artist information
- The Lagos Review preview
- Simon Says Drip exhibition preview
Image credits
Cover image: Artwork by Nike Davies-Okundaye and Tola Wewe, In This Together, 2020. Image courtesy of DADA Gallery.. In-article image: Artwork by Kelechi Chinwendu, When Ala Lived Above, from The Pathways to the Unknown series, 2026. Image courtesy of DADA Gallery..
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