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Quintessence

@quintessenceng

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Discovering African Art. Design. Culture.
Paying attention since 1975.
🔸Open: Mon-Sat 09.00am-7pm & Sun 12pm-6pm
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ARTROAD – Exhibition | Chris “Klay” Ekuafeh Shapes Unity Forged in Clay Chris “Klay” Ekuafeh opened his solo exhibition, Unity Forged in Clay, on the 26 September 2026, at Quintessence Gallery, Lagos. The exhibition runs until 10 October and marks his first solo exhibition on Nigerian soil, following his first solo show in China in 2025 after his residency at the Taoxichuan Arts Centre in Jingdezhen. Words Ireho Aito | Don’t Keep Your Art in the Finger! Photographs courtesy Chris Ekuafeh Chris “Klay” Ekuafeh is a ceramist with ambition and a strong grounding in his craft, Ekuafeh brings together experiences from Kano, Zaria and Lagos in a practice that continues to explore clay, culture, identity and human connection. The first time I saw Chris Ekuafeh was last year at the former headquarters of Fobally Art Gallery, where I was one of the judges for the Fobally Art World Africa Art Competition for Secondary Schools and Higher Institutions. Chris was in the company of Ato Arinze. Both gentlemen had come to check the venue for their group exhibition, which was also coming up at Fobally Art Gallery around the same period. Read more... https://ibandmagazine.com/2026/09/27/artroad-exhibition-chris-klay-ekuafeh-shapes-unity-forged-in-clay/
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Unity Forged in Clay | Quintessence Interestingly, Chris Ekuafeh, the artist exhibiting tells me of his adoption of the Japanese Kintsugi art technique. It is something that he uses to show breakages in these clay pots and gourds rather than disposing them. In his words, "When you buy something in Japan for 50 naira and it breaks, after repairs, it can be worth 250 naira. That item is now seen as something treasurable that went to war and came back." Resilience, methinks. The broken pieces are brought together with golden joinery While some works in the room are finished with wooden rendering or acrylic, the artist leaves few bare in their terracota form. With a consistent use of lines, motifs, and patterns, Chris' scarifications on clay add florid details to each piece that create visual wander for viewers. Additionally, the faces rendered on the sculptures seem to be inspired by Nok art of the Kaduna people with their triangular lips Faces... do these look wooden to you? Trust me, it's all clay Hmmm, something to ponder on... During a journey of self-discovery and actualization, Chris finds dampened tissue papers as a cohesive material with clay. He calls it Paper Gum and its layered texture is appealing to the eyes. In this piece, it represents the finish for the base of this sculpture Hey, enjoy the vid
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Cover | Ato Arinze at 60: The Sculptor Who Chose to Keep Showing Up. At 60, Ato Arinze continues to show that an artist’s journey is built not only on talent, but on commitment and consistency. From sculpture to the many lives his work has touched, his story is one of purpose, persistence and showing up. Words Ireho Aito | Don’t Keep Your Art in the Finger! Photographs Credit: Elizabeth Ekpetorson and Temitope Oladeji. Additional photograph credit: Okotiti Joseph for the Cover My first encounter with Ato Arinze did not begin with a handshake, neither a studio visit nor an exhibition opening. It began from a distance, through Artzero, the platform he spearheaded through Facebook. Before I eventually met the man, I had already encountered something of his thinking, his interest in artists and his determination to create conversations around art. Our physical meeting would come later at Freedom Park on Broad Street, Lagos, during a Nigerian and South African event. By then, Ato had become familiar to me through his work and his kind of movement, but apparently I was not quite what he had imagined. “I was expecting to see a giant of man,” he jokingly said when he discovered the character behind the stories. What I came to know over time was a man whose influence is found less in physical stature than in the spaces, people, conversations and opportunities he has helped to shape. Read more...https://ibandmagazine.com/2026/09/24/cover-ato-arinze-at-60-the-sculptor-who-chose-to-keep-showing-up/
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This is my invitation to you for my upcoming solo exhibition. With Unity Forged in Clay, I plan to present a body of work built around the experience of Unity. What is it? What it means to us individually and as a collective? What actually holds a people together, even across all of our differences? Clay for me has always carried memories that help me tell my stories, and this show is my attempt to put that memory into form through pieces that speak through fracture and repair, pieces that touch on culture and the things we share underneath it all. Opens Saturday, 26th September 2026, 5pm at the Quintessence gallery, Victoria Island, Lagos. If you're in Lagos this weekend, be my guest. Let's dialogue and toast to Unity Forged in Clay. 📸: @veeshyne Edit: @afolabilalah #unityforgedinclay #exhibition #lagos #ceramicart #coek
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ARTROAD – Exhibition | Five Highlights That Made A Collector’s Eye Stand Out At Quintessence Gallery, Lagos, Prof. Ebun Clark’s collection of Adewale Alimi’s works became more than an exhibition. It became a meeting of an artist, a collector, a gallery and years of looking, collecting and remembering. Words Ireho Aito | Don’t Keep Your Art in the Finger! Photographs courtesy  Joseph Okotiti There was something different about Collector Studies: A Collector’s Eye – Prof. Ebun Clark on Artist Alimi Adewale. It was not simply about putting 26 works by one artist on a gallery wall. It was about showing what happens when an artist’s journey is followed closely enough for another person to become part of its history. Inside Quintessence Gallery on Saturday, 12 September 2026, the audience encountered Alimi through the eyes of Prof. Ebun Clark, whose relationship with the artist has grown over years. Here are five highlights that made the exhibition particularly memorable. Read more...https://ibandmagazine.com/2026/09/15/artroad-exhibition-five-highlights-that-made-a-collectors-eye-stand-out/
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ARTROAD – Exhibition | Collector’s Eye: When Ebun Clark Opens Her Collection, Adewale Alimi Comes Home On Saturday, 12 September 2026, at Quintessence Gallery, Lagos, Prof. Ebun Clark presented a selection from her collection of Adewale Alimi’s works, bringing years of the artist’s creative journey into one exhibition. A Collector’s Eye offers a rare look at Alimi’s evolving practice through the works chosen and preserved by one of Nigeria’s foremost art collectors. Words Ireho Aito | Don’t Keep Your Art in the Finger! Photographs Joseph Okotiti I remember my first visit to Adewale Alimi’s studio-house at Atican Beach, along Ibeju Lekki expressway, Lagos.0 It was one of those visits that reminded me why following artists through writing is worthwhile. You enter a studio expecting to see works, but sometimes you leave carrying something beyond the images being fired up in those studios. One thing for sure, is you carry the artist’s environment, his conversations, his way of looking at things and perhaps a better understanding of where the works are coming from. Atican Beach gave that first encounter another texture. Away from the familiar rhythm of central Lagos, Alimi’s home and studio sat within an environment where the coastal landscape, the developing community, the buildings, the sea and the changing human presence around him became part of his everyday visual experience. It was not difficult to imagine an artist observing the city differently from there. The beach was not simply his address. It was another studio. Read more...https://ibandmagazine.com/2026/09/14/artroad-exhibition-collectors-eye-when-ebun-clark-opens-her-collection-adewale-alimi-comes-home/
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Cover | Yusuf Durodola Upcycle World : So Useful, the World Honours His Usefulness “I have seen this as my calling. I got determined that this is no more passion but life itself.” As the ArtMiabo International Art Festival draws closer, one of the creative Nigerians who has helped shape its story graces our Cover Edition. Yusuf Durodola takes us into his world, growing up, family, influence and the experiences that helped make him who he is today. His journey did not begin with art alone. He fell in love with accounting and mathematics, disciplines built on numbers, order and calculation. Yet, somewhere along the way, creativity changed the equation. Today, those early influences have found a different expression. Durodola has carved a creative path of his own, one that has increasingly brought people to him in search of something deeply personal: the freedom to express themselves. In this Cover Edition, he talks about the people, places and experiences behind the man and the creative force we have come to know as Yusuf Durodola. Words Ireho Aito | Don’t Keep Your Art in the Finger! Photographs courtesy Yusuf Durodola archives He was infectious to everyone around him. It was hard not to notice Yusuf Durodola, not only because of his top-notch fashion appearance, always turning out in beautifully embroidered African fabrics with the cap to match, but also because of the energy he brought to whatever he was doing. I watched the behind-the-scenes of Yusuf trying to direct an orchestrated scene for a short documentary on one of the legends of Nigerian art, painter and teacher of teachers, Dr Kolade Osinowo, during the Kolade Osinowo Honour at the ArtMiabo Art Festival. Watching him move around the production, trying to put the story together, offered another glimpse into the many sides of a man who is never quite limited to one role. Read more...https://ibandmagazine.com/2026/09/12/cover-yusuf-durodola-upcycle-world-so-useful-the-world-honours-his-usefulness/
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ARTROAD – Exhibition | Collector Studies – A Collector’s Eye, Prof. Ebun Clark Looks at Alimi Adewale Through Time. What happens when an artist’s journey is seen not only through the works he creates, but through the eyes of someone who has watched, collected and preserved that journey? This weekend at Quintessence Gallery, Lagos, that question will take a particularly interesting form as Professor Ebun Clark opens her private collection of works by artist Alimi Adewale to the public. Words Ireho Aito | Don’t Keep Your Art in the Finger! There is a particular intimacy in seeing an artist through the eyes of a collector. The relationship goes beyond ownership. It speaks to recognition, patience and the ability to look at an artwork and see something that may not yet be obvious to everyone else. This is the spirit behind Collector Studies: A Collector’s Eye, a new exhibition by Quintessence Gallery, having with Professor Ebun Clark and her collection of works by Nigerian artist Alimi Adewale. For Professor Clark, collecting has never been about simply filling walls. Her journey began in 1964 with antique masks while she was a lecturer at the University of Ibadan. By 1965, after moving to Lagos and visiting one of the modernists, Bruce Onobrakpeya with the help of her renowned husband Prof. J. P. Clark, she had begun collecting prints and developed the remarkable relationship with Bruce Onobrakpeya that would become one of the defining stories of her life as a collector. Her instinct was often to look beyond what was immediately obvious. At Bruce’s old studio back then, not the current one, she once picked up a print the artist himself had discarded because he was dissatisfied with the result. She kept it. “Don’t worry, I will keep it,” she told him. That simple decision has come to represent much of what makes her eye so important and the willingness to recognise value before consensus arrives. Read more... https://ibandmagazine.com/2026/09/10/artroad-exhibition-collector-studies-a-collectors-eye-prof-ebun-clark-looks-at-alimi-adewale-through-time/
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Cover | Josiah. C. Josiah : The Colours That Follow Us Home – “Every colour has its influence” On a road trip from Lagos to Abuja, an artist began asking a deceptively simple question: what if the colours we paint with are already telling us where we come from? Words Ireho Aito | Don’t Keep Your Art in the Finger! Photographs courtesy Josiah. C. Josiah archives There is a moment when an artist stops looking at colour merely as colour. Red is no longer simply red. Blue begins to carry the weight of a particular sky. Ochre starts to resemble the earth beneath one’s feet. Green becomes inseparable from the vegetation that surrounded childhood. Even the intensity of a colour can begin to suggest something about the weather, soil, people, culture and landscape that produced it. This is where Josiah C. Josiah found himself. For an artist whose first love was drawing and colour, the discovery did not come from sitting quietly in a studio. It came from leaving it. Between May 13 and 29, 2026, Josiah embarked on what he called The Drawing Tour, a road trip through locations between Lagos and Abuja, including Ibadan and Osogbo. He travelled with drawings, charcoal, pigments and questions, meeting artists, craftsmen, curators and gallery practitioners along the way. Beneath the movement was a serious investigation: how does environment influence the colours artists see, choose, produce and eventually put on canvas? It sounds simple until one begins to look closely. Why does an artist in Benin repeatedly arrive at certain earth tones? Why might fabrics from Iseyin carry a visual character different from those produced elsewhere? Why does Abuja seem to possess its own particular light? Why is the soil in other parts of the country different from that of other parts too, and can such differences enter an artist’s consciousness? Read more...https://ibandmagazine.com/2026/09/01/cover-josiah-c-josiah-the-colours-that-follow-us-home-every-colour-has-its-influence/
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Beautiful works of art @quintessenceng
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Don’t Keep Your Art in the Finger! Afolayan Emmanuel, Painting the Quiet World Within – “My art delves into the profound concept of the mind,” In the paintings of Afolayan Emmanuel, silence is not emptiness. It is a place where the mind speaks, memories settle and a person begins to see himself again. Words Ireho Aito | Don’t Keep Your Art in the Finger! Photographs and images courtesy Afolayan Emmanuel There is something unusually quiet about Afolayan Emmanuel’s paintings. One can see the paintings do not rush towards the viewer or shout for attention with loud colours or dramatic gestures. Instead, they seem to wait. One can see a face looks away and a figure pauses. As one looks more deeply, one can see a pair of eyes appears to be somewhere between the world we can see and another world that exists only inside the mind. And if one stays with the painting long enough, that quietness begins to speak. This is perhaps the most interesting thing about the 25-year-old Nigerian artist. He is painting figures, but his real subject is the space behind the figures, that is, the private territory of thought, memory, self-esteem, belonging and the difficult business of learning to be comfortable with oneself. For Emmanuel, the mind is not a side subject. It is the centre of everything. “My art delves into the profound concept of the mind,” he says, describing the distinction between what he calls “two worlds apart” – our internal thoughts and the external reality. “Our mind forms the most integral part of our being, making it essential to guard it diligently.” Read more...https://ibandmagazine.com/2026/09/01/dont-keep-your-art-in-the-finger-afolayan-emmanuel-painting-the-quiet-world-within-my-art-delves-into-the-profound-concept-of-the-mind/
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ORI II GROUP EXHIBITION OF CONTEMPORARY SCULPTURE WENT LIVE ON THE 29TH OF AUGUST! . The exhibition runs till the 13th of September. @quintessenceng DONT MISS IT!!! #metalsculpture #exhibition
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