Asiru Olatunde, 1918-1993
Biography

Asiru Olatunde was born in 1918 in Oshogbo, Nigeria, into a family of blacksmiths, training in the trade like his father and grandfather before him. A severe illness in the late 1950s forced him to give up blacksmithing; he turned first to ceremonial drumming and to making jewelry and animal-shaped bangles for the local market.

Encouraged by the writer Ulli Beier and the artist Suzanne Wenger, Olatunde began working with metal panels in 1961, developing a distinctive repoussé technique: incising and hammering scenes into copper and, later, aluminum. His compositions draw on Yoruba oral tradition and mythology, Biblical stories reimagined in Nigerian settings, and scenes of everyday life, with the Tree of Life and the Garden of Eden recurring as motifs tied to his connection to the sacred Osun-Osogbo groves. He became a leading figure of the Oshogbo School of art and, in 1967, the first chairman of the Oshogbo Artists Association.

Olatunde sold his work locally and internationally, both in the Oshogbo market and through commissions for churches, palaces and banks. His panels are held in major institutional collections and have been exhibited at the National Museum of African Art, the Tate Modern, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. He died in 1993.