O'DA Art Gallery Asserts: Black Figuration Is Alive and Well

Lagos, Nigeria — July 13–August 9, 2025

In response to a growing chorus in the global art world declaring that “Black figuration is over,” O’DA Art Gallery’s latest exhibition, Black Figuration is Alive and Well, offers a firm and timely rebuttal. Bringing together a dynamic group of contemporary artists working across painting, sculpture, photography, collage, and digital media, the exhibition argues for figuration not as trend or aesthetic repetition, but as a vital language of presence, imagination, and agency.

Installation Image | Black Figuration is Alive and Well | Courtesy of O'DA Art

Far from being exhausted, Black figuration remains one of the most politically and emotionally resonant modes of expression today. It continues to assert itself not just in form, but in function—as a tool for reclaiming history, narrating lived experience, and making space for complexity. At its core, the exhibition affirms the centrality of figuration in African and diasporic visual traditions, rooted in ancestral sculpture, ritual, photography, mural painting, and oral histories. These practices have long emphasized representation as a way of remembering, resisting, and belonging.

This new generation of artists are expanding the field even further—moving beyond realism into surrealism, abstraction, speculative narratives, and fragmented form. Across the works on view, the Black figure becomes a site of multiplicity, often resisting any fixed interpretation. Whether rendered in intimate portraiture or larger conceptual gestures, the bodies in this show are not just being seen—they are asserting their right to shape how they are seen.

At a time when saturation in the visual field often leads to calls for novelty, Black Figuration is Alive and Well questions who gets to decide what is “over,” and why. At O’DA Art ,the show takes seriously the idea that pronouncements of fatigue around Black portraiture can sometimes mask a deeper discomfort with Black visibility itself—especially when that visibility comes with power, emotion, and narrative control.

By showcasing artists who refuse containment, the exhibition becomes a space for creative reclamation. Here, figuration becomes a strategy of remembering, of care, of speculative imagining—and above all, of survival. The show is not simply about representation. It is about the right to be represented fully, expansively, and on one’s own terms.

In this moment, O’DA Art Gallery positions itself as part of an ongoing global dialogue about Black art and its futures. Black Figuration is Alive and Well is a clear statement that the work of depicting, dreaming, and defining Black life is far from complete—and that figuration remains a critical and alive force within it.

Installation Image | Black Figuration is Alive and Well, | Courtesy of O'DA Art