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kó

@ko_artspace

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kó is an art space based in Lagos, Nigeria, that is dedicated to promoting modern and contemporary art.

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kó is pleased to announce its participation at Frieze Masters London, taking place October 14-18, 2026. kó will present a solo presentation of Nigerian modernist Adebisi Fabunmi in the "Spotlight" section, which examines pioneering global artists of the twentieth century.

Adebisi Fabunmi (1945-2024) was a leading figure of Nigeria’s Osogbo Art School, a movement that emerged in the early 1960s at the dawn of Nigeria’s independence, fusing indigenous Yoruba traditions with experimental modern forms. Fabunmi developed his practice through a series of informal workshops held between 1964-1966 at Mbari Mbayo, an informal cultural center in Osogbo, and gained international visibility from the mid-1960s onward. His compositions often unfold as staged scenes, structured through bold geometric forms that draw on mythology, performance, and everyday life.

@friezeofficial #friezemasters by @ko_artspace

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kó's presentation of Adebisi Fabunmi is featured in FAD Magazine's "Five to See at Frieze Masters 2026"! Lee Sharrock writes: “Nigerian gallery kó brings the work of Adebisi Fabunmi (1945–2023) to Frieze Masters in a presentation of rare paintings and works on paper from the 1960s and 1970s. Also featured in Spotlight, the exhibition offers an opportunity to discover a pioneering figure of Nigeria’s Osogbo Art School and reconsider the complex relationship between African artistic traditions and modernism.”

@worldoffad @friezemasters by @ko_artspace

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We're open! kó's solo presentation of Adebisi Fabunmi is featured at Frieze Masters, October 14-18, 2026, in Spotlight, Booth S18.

Adebisi Fabunmi (1945–2023) was a pioneering modern artist of Nigeria’s Osogbo Art School, an informal artistic movement that emerged in the 1960s at the dawn of Nigeria’s independence. Developed through a series of experimental art workshops held in the southwestern Yoruba town of Osogbo between 1962-1966, the movement fostered a generation of artists who translated Yoruba history, mythology, and design through the formal concerns of modernism. Adebisi (“Bisi”) Fabunmi emerged as one of the Osogbo School’s early leading figures, developing a distinctive visual language characterised by rhythmic line, flattened perspective, and densely patterned compositions. His paintings incorporate Yoruba cosmology and folklore within urban architectural landscapes, bringing mythic narratives into dialogue with the realities of modern life.

@friezemasters by @ko_artspace

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Adebisi Fabunmi settled in Osogbo in 1962, where his sister was living and was in a relationship with Duro Ladipo, who had recently opened Mbari Mbayo with Ulli Beier. Through this connection, Fabunmi began painting cinema signboards and theatrical backdrops before joining Ladipo’s travelling theatre company. Ladipo’s theatre company became a nucleus of the emerging Osogbo movement. Fabunmi, Twins Seven-Seven, Muraina Oyelami, Rufus Ogundele, Jimoh Buraimoh, and Jacob Afolabi all emerged from the troupe, working variously as actors, musicians, stage painters, and performers.

Fabunmi performed minor roles in productions including "Oba Moro" and "Oba Koso", while continuing to work on painted scenery. In 1964, he performed with Ladipo’s troupe at the Berlin Theatre Festival in Germany and painted backdrops for its European tour. The production of large-scale theatrical scenery provided an early foundation for the expansive compositions he would later develop in his painting.

Visit kó's presentation of Adebisi Fabunmi at Frieze Masters, October 14-18, 2026, Booth S18.

@friezemasters by @ko_artspace

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Adebisi Fabunmi's "The Wrestler" (1970) depicts two figures engaged in a wrestling match, their bodies meeting at the center. Other works move more freely between personal experience and imaginative subjects. Fabunmi experiments with different ways of fitting multiple figures and ideas within a single image, creating scenes that slowly become visible.

kó's solo presentation of Adebisi Fabunmi at Frieze Masters includes group of pastel works on paper from the late 1960s and 1970s that shows the artist developing a unique abstract approach to storytelling. Across these works, ambiguous forms are broken apart and reassembled. Broad passages of color are divided by irregular geometric shapes, some angular and architectural, others curved and organic. These planes do not conform to conventional perspective. Forms appear to sit in front of, behind, and within one another into a continuously shifting pictorial space.

Visit kó's presentation at Frieze Masters, Booth S18.

@friezemasters by @ko_artspace

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Poster for Osogbo Artists exhibition at Goethe Insitute, Lagos, 1966, with Adebisi Fabunmi’s linocut as the artwork image.

Linocuts played an especially important role in his Adebisi Fabumni's artistic development. His “city prints” depicted dense, puzzle-like compositions in which houses, animals, symbols, and scenes of urban life were woven together through black-and-white pattern. This approach informed his painting, where strong outlines, repeated forms, and tightly connected structures similarly allowed disparate symbols to occupy the same pictorial space.

Visit kó's presentation of Adebisi Fabunmi at Frieze Masters, October 14-18, 2026, Booth S18.

@friezemasters by @ko_artspace

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"Elders" (1964), one Adebisi Fabunmi's earliest known paintings, turns to the social life of Osogbo, depicting a group of older men gathered around a game of ayo, a traditional Yoruba board game. Fabunmi concentrates the scene around the game board, where the exaggerated hand of the seated player reaches into the centre of the composition as three men look on from behind. Fabunmi constructs the scene through simplified, angular shapes. The player's elongated limbs curve around the board, the spectators are reduced to a compact row of faces, and the surrounding buildings frame the gathering. The elevated viewpoint makes the ayo board unusually prominent. Painted at the beginning of Fabunmi's career, Elders reveals his interest in elevating ordinary rituals.

This work is included in kó's solo presentation of Adebisi Fabunmi at Frieze Masters, October 14-18, 2026, Booth S18.

@friezemasters by @ko_artspace

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"Royalty (The Taste of Power" (1978), featured in kó's presentation of Adebisi Fabunmi at Frieze Masters, brings the artist's mature style to the subject of Yoruba kingship and authority. Three monumental figures stand tightly together within the tall, narrow composition, their elongated bodies extending almost the full height of the canvas. Presented frontally, they possess a commanding, almost sculptural presence, while their simplified faces, enlarged eyes, and highly stylised features draw upon the visual traditions of Yoruba carving.

The title introduces a more ambiguous dimension to this representation of royalty. Fabunmi does not illustrate a particular ruler or event, but instead uses the monumental human figure to consider the performance of authority itself. Painted in 1978, during a period of military rule in Nigeria and the cusp of Nigeria’s oil boom, the work also resonates with broader issues surrounding power and leadership.

Visit kó's booth at Frieze Masters, October 14-18, 2026, Booth S18.

@friezemasters by @ko_artspace

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This painting by Adebisi Fabunmi, included in kó's presentation at Frieze Masters, demonstrates the expansion of the artist's practice by the 1970s, both in scale and compositional complexity. Across the panoramic surface, human faces, mask-like forms, animals, birds, vegetation, and other enigmatic shapes are interwoven within a dense network of geometric pattern and curving black line. Forms overlap and intersect without conventional perspective or a single focal point, creating a continuous field in which figures emerge gradually from the surrounding abstraction. Fabunmi's palette also become considerably more complex, giving the surface an almost mosaic-like intensity. At this large scale, the composition recalls his formative work producing sets and painted backdrops for Duro Ladipo's travelling theatre company. Here, Fabunmi creates an immersive pictorial world in which ambiguous forms appear to inhabit the same interconnected space.

@friezemasters by @ko_artspace

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Adebisi Fabunmi and Georgina Beier working on their joint mural for the palace of Otan Aiyegbaju, 1965. kó's presentation of Adebisi Fabunmi at Frieze Masters features the the artist's rare early paintings and works on paper from the 1960s and 1970s.

Adebisi Fabunmi worked closely with British artist Georgina Beier, who facilitated the Third Experimental Workshop at Mbari Mbayo in August 1964. Alongside the other artists who came to be known as the Osogbo School, Fabunmi developed his artistic practice over the following two years, from 1964 until December 1966, when the Beiers left Nigeria at the onset of the Nigerian Civil War. During this period, the artists worked in studios at the Osogbo Museum and the Beier-Wenger residence in an environment that encouraged collaboration.

In 1965, Fabunmi participated in Mbari Mbayo’s project to decorate the palace of Otan Aiyegbaju, the Oba’s palace in Osogbo, painting two murals jointly with Georgina Beier. The project brought him early critical recognition. In May 1965, the Daily Times described their collaborative mural as “thoroughly modern,” while another contemporary account singled out Fabunmi’s work, writing “the great new discovery made at Otan Aiyegbaju was the work of Adebisi Fabunmi... Fabunmi's mural at the palace has a relaxed movement a swinging gaiety, an original imagery that establishes him as one of Nigeria’s most interesting younger artists”.

Visit kó's solo presentation of Adebisi Fabunmi at Frieze Masters, October 14-18, 2026, Booth S18.

@friezemasters by @ko_artspace

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"Animal Dance" (1964), one of Fabunmi’s earliest known paintings, was produced during the same year that he participated in Georgina Beier’s experimental art workshop at Mbari Mbayo and began his visual art practice in earnest. The work places two red-toned animal figures within a densely compressed landscape of clustered rooftops, introducing the relationship between Yoruba mythology and the lived environment of Osogbo that would become central to his practice.

Animals occupy an important place within Yoruba folklore and cosmology, where they can move between the human, natural, and spiritual realms. Here, the animals appear embedded within the town itself, surrounded by houses that rise and overlap across the surface. Already visible are many of the formal characteristics he would develop over the following decades: flattened perspective, simplified forms, bold contours, and the compression of figures and architecture into a single pictorial field. In this early work, Fabunmi begins to transform Osogbo from a literal setting into an imaginative space.

This work is included in kó's solo presentation of Adebisi Fabunmi at Frieze Masters, October 14-18, Booth S18.

@friezemasters by @ko_artspace

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Adebisi Fabunmi was a core member of Nigeria's Osogbo School, which came together through the activities of several international and Nigerian artists and intellectuals living in the town in the 1960s, including German professor Ulli Beier, British artist Georgina Betts Beier, Austrian artist Susanne Wenger, and Nigerian playwright Duro Ladipo. Its origins can be traced to the Mbari Club in Ibadan, founded by Beier in 1961 as a cultural meeting place connected to the intellectual community around the University of Ibadan. In Osogbo, Beier sought to extend the spirit of Mbari into a more informal, community-based setting.

Mbari Mbayo, its name derived from a Yoruba phrase meaning “when we see it, we shall be happy,” opened in Osogbo and became a nucleus of this emerging movement. Outside of formal art-school training, these artists forged highly original approaches to painting, printmaking, textile, and mixed media, retaining a cohesive visual language rooted in Yoruba culture.

kó's presentation of Adebisi Fabunmi at Frieze Masters London opens next week, October 14-18, 2026, Booth S18. by @ko_artspace

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