Major works by major West African artists will be offered in October’s Modern and Contemporary African Art sale in London on 16 October 2024. The 70-lot sale contains 33 works by West African artists, including a number of remarkable works by Ben Enwonwu, a panel piece by El Anatsui, a vast installation by Ibrahim Mahama and six panels that create a mural by contemporary artist, Slawn.
Helene Love-Allotey, Head of Modern and Contemporary African Art Department, said: “This is one of the most exciting offerings of West African work that Bonhams has presented in a sale. The works range from two masterworks by Benedict Enwonwu to cutting-edge contemporary pieces: the spectacular installation by Ibrahim Mahama and a six-canvas mural by Slawn. We expect a lot of interest from around the world.”
Ben Enwonwu (Nigerian, 1917-1994)
The top lot from West African artists in Bonhams Modern and Contemporary African Art sale is FESTAC by the revered master of Nigerian art, Ben Enwonwu, (estimate £300,000 – 500,000). The work was inspired by a monumental cultural initiative of the same name for which the artist served as a key figure. Celebrating global African culture, the FESTAC 1977 focused on African art and artists, and their role in promoting African aspirations. Held in Lagos, the festival provided a forum for how African modernity should and could be expressed post-colonisation. It was attended by more than 16,000 participants representing 56 African countries and attracted half a million visitors, making it the largest pan-African gathering at that time.
For Enwonwu, the concept of Negritude lay in the form of the Black African woman, which is the subject of both FESTAC and of Negritude, another work in the Bonhams sale (estimate £200,000 – 300,000). In both FESTAC and Negritude, the sinuous silhouette of the female represented his ideal of African culture; beautiful, powerful and full of creative potential. Indeed, in FESTAC, the sitter’s three-quarter profile and regal posture can be seen as synonymous with Enwonwu’s most famous portrait, Tutu of the Ife princess Adetutu Ademiluyi, and which Bonhams sold for £1.2m in 2018, a world record for a Nigerian painting.
El Anatsui (Ghanaian, born 1944)
Change Goes On, signed and dated ‘EL 1993-2020’
El Anatsui’s work is known throughout the world for its language of an African aesthetic. His work is on the global stage and in major international collections such as Museum of Modern Art, New York, The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., The British Museum, London and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
El Anatsui began his artistic training in Kumasi, where he was given a grounding in Western art traditions and practices. Wanting to connect with the arts of his own country, he began to visit the Kumasi National Cultural Centre on weekends. Here he was exposed to weavers, potters, cloth-printers and carvers, all working in indigenous methods.
The artist began to incorporate elements from these crafts into his own work, forging a distinctly Ghanaian aesthetic. The present work employs the colours and geometric symbols traditionally used for Asante Adinkra cloth. The age-old Adinkra patterns are counter-posed by modern construction techniques. The planks of wood have been cut with a chainsaw and blackened with an acetylene torch. For the artist, the tearing of the saw through wood functioned as “a metaphor for the way in which the western powers had carved up and brutally divided the African continent amongst themselves, ripping through and destroying both local history and culture”.
Ibrahim Mahama (Ghanaian b.1987)
A major installation piece by Ghanaian artist, Ibrahim Mahama, Untitled from 2013, has an estimate of £30,000-50,000 and comprises 11 draped coal sacks made from jute that hang down from the walls. The work was first exhibited in Pangaea: New Art from Africa to Latin America at the Saatchi Gallery in 2014. It is being offered from the Saatchi Collection.
Born in 1987 in Tamale, Ibrahim Mahama is one of the most exciting contemporary artists working in Africa today. Educated at Ghana’s prestigious Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (K.N.U.S.T.) with a degree in Painting and a Masters in Painting and Sculpture, Mahama had a work chosen for Ghana’s first national pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. His work also featured at Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel in 2017. Additionally, Mahama has had solo exhibitions at the White Cube gallery in London – most recently, Lazurus in 2021 – and has created major installation works at Kumasi Railway station. In July 2024, Mahama transformed the Barbican Arts Centre by enveloping the Brutalist concrete walls in 2,000 metres of woven cloth. The work, Purple Hibiscus, was a collaboration with hundreds of craftspeople from Mahama’s birthplace, Tamale in Ghana.
Made in Southeast Asia, Untitled from 2013 is created out of sacks imported by the Ghana Cocoa Boards to package cocoa beans for export. The used sacks are then repurposed to carry animal feed, coal, and charcoal around the country for domestic consumption. Roughly printed or drawn on the surface of the sacks are the companies and traders’ names or transit locations by which they travel. For Mahama, the jute sacks are material metaphors for the global circulation of commodities that pass through Ghana and its associated socio-economic inequities. At Bonhams, the work has been installed with the supervision of the artist himself so that the 11 separate sheets are draped and ripple which contributes to a fluid motion.
Slawn (Nigerian, born 2000)
In a career that has broken traditional artistic boundaries, Slawn (Olaolu Akeredolu-Ale) has carved out his own niche. A cultural icon and entrepreneur extending his practice beyond the canvas, Slawn collaborated with the late Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton, and designed the set and award for the 2023 Brit awards. In order to connect with the community, Slawn also set up a café in East London which he turned into a cultural hub and where he displayed his art.
Untitled, (2020), the work in Bonhams sale, consists of six panels and is from the period that led to Slawn’s rise to fame. Each canvas is different and yet links to the others to present a mural that conveys the urban culture of Nigeria and London. In an amalgamation of line paintings of shapes and cartoon-like figures, Slawn generates his works in both aerosol paint and thick marker pens. Slawn began his career by giving away is artworks at parties or as trophies in his occasional ‘fight clubs’ whereby studio visits led to fighting matches for art. “It came about from two people being in my studio and I said to them: ‘If you don’t want to buy [a painting], then you can fight for it.”
Sale Information:
Date: 16 October 2024
Location: London
Browse the auction: https://www.bonhams.com/auction/29863/modern-and-contemporary-african-art/
Discover the top picks from the sale selected by Curator and Writer Ekow Eshun: https://www.bonhams.com/stories/38848/
