ACETNews
One of Nigeria’s leading arts centres, The Quintessence Gallery on Victoria Island, Lagos, will on Saturday, September 12, open its maiden Collector Studies, A Collector’s Eye: Prof. Ebun Clark x Alimi on Saturday, by 5pm. The presentation marks the beginning of Quintessence Collector Studies, a new series examining collectors who have played important roles in sustaining Nigeria’s cultural ecosystem. It is also meant to interrogate what private collections can reveal about artistic practice and cultural memory over time.
Alimi Adewale, whose works will form the bulk of the collection, is a Nigerian artist who uses the medium of painting, sculptures and installations to explore urban issues and the lives of everyday people in cities. His practice combines elements of minimalism and abstraction to evoke the dynamism and intensity of the cosmopolitan environment. Most of his work has a profusion of rich textures and oftentimes an uncommon sculptural finish. According to the Managing Director, Quintessence, Jude T. Oni-Okpaku, the gallery spends a great deal of time looking at artists with much less attention given to the people who collect their works, live with it over many years and, in doing so, help preserve another kind of record.
“For this first edition, works by Alimi from the private collection of Prof. Ebun Clark are brought together to consider one central question:
What can a private collection reveal about an artist over time? Seen together, the works offer a view of Alimi through the sustained attention of one collector, showing how collecting can become more than ownership, preserving moments, changes and relationships that might otherwise remain unseen.
The works are not for sale,” he said.
The programme will include a brief conversation with Prof. Clark about her relationship with Alimi’s work: the first pieces she acquired, what drew her back over the years, and what she now sees when they are considered together.
The Oluwani Creative Arts Foundation (OCAF) will also be acknowledged in connection with Prof. Clark’s collection and cultural activities. For Quintessence, Collector Studies forms part of a broader interest in the people, relationships, archives and institutions that allow culture to endure across generations.
This Quintessence outing is a follow up to Prof Clark’s show of her private collection of Bruce Onobrakpeya’s pioneering works and other artists in the past three decades, held last year October at the National Museum, Lagos.
Prof Clark is not just another art collector as she lived arts as a theatre scholar. Prof Clark is the first Nigerian Professor of Theatre Arts and Chief Hubert Ogunde’s biographer, Hubert Ogunde: The Making of the Nigerian Theatre, her book on the legendary thespian. She remains the authority on the subject.
She was also the pioneer staff of the first Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Ibadan before she joined her husband the late Prof JP Clark at the English Department at the University of Lagos, where she rose as the director of the Centre of Cultural Studies. She became a professor in 1985. She was founder of LASEM for English and Mathematics.