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3 Exhibitions to See This Week
In Lagos, Victoria Ndubuisi and Paulcy Odama turn bodies into landscape and monumental architecture into something fragile. In Abuja, Dotun Popoola bends discarded metal until it holds movement and likeness. In Paris, four decades of Kerry James Marshall place Black figures at the centre of history painting. Three shows about what a surface can be made to carry.
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Victoria Ndubuisi and Paulcy Odama, Groundwork
Nomadic Art Gallery, Lagos · By Sabo Kpade
In Paulcy Odama’s Humans and Sound (2026), the auditorium recalls a nineteenth-century European opera house more than a Greek theatre: stacked balconies, repeated balustrades, tiers and an audience above the performance space. What is peculiar is the viewer’s point of view. We seem to occupy the stage and look outward, with the orchestra immediately before us; we stand where a performer would stand. Look closely and the orchestra includes violins and a harp, but also shakers and talking drums—instruments that break the expectations of the concert setting. The chalk-white figures are talking, reading, turning, leaning rather than submitting to the spectacle. The audience becomes another performance. Victoria Ndubuisi’s Earth Holds Us (2026) masses all the bodily weight into the centre of the frame; rivulets of pigment make the picture plane look like a relief map. Bodies become topography. But the distinction between the two is unstable: Odama’s monumental architecture sits on stitched, gauzy surfaces, while Ndubuisi’s figures dissolve into landscape. Groundwork is strongest when architecture becomes vulnerable and flesh becomes landscape.
Through 26 September 2026.
Dotun Popoola, Reclaimed Beauty: A Dialogue Between Continents
The Village by Tikera, Idu, Abuja · By Rejoice Anodo
Dotun Popoola’s sculptures are visible from far off, at least twice as large in person as they appear online. He leaves the reclaimed metal unpainted, except for tiny details such as the red comb on a rooster’s head. Where you’d expect sculpture to be smooth, with no rough lines, Popoola keeps the rust. In his animals, bent and twisted metal captures the muscles and lines of bodies in motion. Even the bases of the largest works are metal rather than concrete. He doesn’t change his subjects to look good in our eyes; he presents them the way they are. There is something every Nigerian can relate to: busts of Wole Soyinka and Fela Kuti, a car carrying a family with a dog’s head out of the window, a container painted as a school bus. But put together, the narrative is confusing. The bus promises childhood nostalgia that its interior doesn’t deliver, and animals and references from outside Nigeria weaken the exhibition’s claim to speak on Nigerian life. What holds is Popoola’s dexterity: the works reward standing close enough to see how discarded metal has been made to hold movement, likeness and weight.
Through 30 September 2026.
Kerry James Marshall, The Histories
Musée d’art Moderne de Paris, Paris · By Nana Poulot
Kerry James Marshall’s first exhibition in France is a monumental, two-fold accomplishment: a continuation of his lifelong exploration of Black life in America, and a way to insert the African American narrative into the received history of art. In his images of Afro-romance and everyday scenes set in parks, barbershops and interiors, Marshall elevates the everyday to the epic, while his emphatic depictions of Black skin challenge the idea of blackness, as a colour and as an identity, as synonymous with absence or achromatic emptiness. His series on the Middle Passage and his retracing of the legacies of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements draw with extraordinary inventiveness on the personalities that made Black history, but also on objects made in Africa, African religions and how both are transformed once they travel beyond the continent. Highlights include Past Times (1997) and Knowledge and Wonder (1995), his largest canvas to date, but it is the grandeur of a story told across more than four decades that makes The Histories so powerful.
Through 24 January 2027.
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![Gabriel Selassie Tsagli, Rave, 2026. [wall colour and oil on canvas, 240 x 360 cm] Courtesy the artist and Gallery 1957.](https://framerusercontent.com/images/GB4ZGt77CZIaYOGRvACPSKx3rd0.png?width=631&height=404)
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On October 12, 2025, the Ecobank Pan African Centre in Lagos opens its doors to Fela Kuti: Afrobeat Rebellion, marking the return of an exhibition that celebrates one of Africa’s most influential cultural figures. Originally curated by the Philharmonie de Paris in 2022, the exhibition is now reimagined for its Nigerian debut by the A Whitespace Creative Arts (AWCA) Foundation, with support from the French Embassy in Nigeria and the Kuti family.
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Victoria Ndubuisi’s distinctive approach to painting captures attention in a remarkable way. In her ongoing solo exhibition titled "Ọmụgwo," she employs a unique marbling technique for the backgrounds of her artworks, created through the dynamic act of performance.
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