By Nii B. Andrews.
Very few African artists have shared their opinions of Western society in their work; this is particularly so with respect to CAA.
CAA in which there “is an expression of manifest otherness, a visual commentary on the strange life ways of the Europeans” is quite uncommon.
The art of the pioneering Nigerian artist, Demas Nwoko (born 1935) is important since he utilizes exciting modernist images to communicate the popular archive of what Africans perceive or imagine “of Europeans, with their ‘strange’ cultures, practices and ideas about community”.
Nwoko is a gifted painter, sculptor, theater director, designer and architect.
But the Adam and Eve series are considered his magnum opus in the painting genre. The series did comprise of three paintings.
One featured a naked black couple in a garden paradise of tropical fauna and flora. Sadly, this painting was last seen in Dakar in 1966; it has disappeared.
The other two depicted European couples in an urban setting.
In METRO RIDE, Nwoko highlights the passionate affection of a couple against the strong individualistic ethos of western urban life.
He provides a poignant commentary by distorting the faces and limbs of the urban individuals who appear to be – well, caricatures lost in their own world.
Nwoko was a founding member of the Zaria Art Society – a group of students that were in the vanguard of post colonial modernism in Nigeria during the early 1960s.
He sojourned in France for close to a year on a scholarship after graduation in 1961.
Following his return to Nigeria he focused mainly on wood sculpture and terracotta pieces. In the late 1960s his attention was solely on architecture and it earned him further international acclaim.
