The Oshogbo School of Art

In the early 1960s, a series of experimental workshops in the Nigerian town of Osogbo gave a group of young, largely self-taught artists the space, materials and encouragement to develop styles entirely their own, grounded in Yoruba oral tradition rather than any Western academic model (...)

The Mbari Mbayo workshops were initiated by the expatriate couple Ulli and Georgina Beier, together with the Nigerian playwright Duro Ladipo, at a moment when Osogbo, in southwestern Nigeria, was becoming a lively cultural crossroads. Deliberately, the workshops welcomed participants with no prior training in the visual arts: dancers, musicians, travelling performers, a former blacksmith. What the Beiers offered was not instruction in technique, but time, materials and the confidence to trust one's own imagination.

Taiwo Olaniyi Osuntoki, who took the stage name Twins Seven-Seven after surviving as the sole child of seven sets of twins born to his mother, arrived at Osogbo as an itinerant dancer and musician and, almost by accident, into one of these workshops in 1964. Ulli Beier recognised in his drawings an imagination he compared to that of the novelist Amos Tutuola, and within two years Twins Seven-Seven had become the most celebrated of the Osogbo artists, his densely patterned, ink-and-colour narratives populated by spirits, animals and Yoruba deities.

Around the same workshops gathered a generation of equally distinctive artists: Rufus Ogundele, whose paintings fuse European pictorial influence with Yoruba subject matter; Jacob Afolabi, known for his intricate narrative compositions; and Jimoh Buraimoh, who extended the school's visual vocabulary by embedding thousands of glass beads directly into his paintings, a technique he developed and made his own.

Asiru Olatunde came to art from a different direction. A blacksmith by trade, like his father and grandfather before him, he was forced to give up the forge after a severe illness, and turned instead to hammering scenes into sheets of copper and aluminium, a technique known as repoussé. Encouraged, like the others, by Ulli Beier and the artist Suzanne Wenger, Olatunde became a leading figure of the wider Osogbo movement and, in 1967, the first chairman of the Oshogbo Artists Association.

What united this loose constellation of artists was never a shared style so much as a shared permission: to draw on Yoruba mythology, proverb and everyday life without deference to the conventions of European fine art. The results were, and remain, unmistakably individual — dense, patterned, narrative surfaces that owe nothing to any school but their own.

AFRICAN|CONTEMPORARY features several artists from this movement, including Twins Seven-Seven, Asiru Olatunde, Rufus Ogundele, Jacob Afolabi and Jimoh Buraimoh, with original works available to view, discover and acquire directly from the gallery.