There's a section in Duke Asidere's exhibition at Adegbola Gallery where the lights are meant to be dim. Wall clocks — some ticking, some stopped, a few with dead batteries left in on purpose — hang alongside his paintings like a second body of work. One marks his son's seventeenth birthday. Another, handcrafted and found in a shop in Delta, has no real function beyond keeping time for its own sake. A third stopped the day his mother died, a year and a half ago, and he has kept it exactly as it broke.

"I stay in the dark, turn off the lights, and the ticking of the clock brings me an inner joy," Asidere said on opening day. It's a strange, tender detail for an exhibition that otherwise reads as a career-spanning survey — but it's also the clearest way into understanding what Asidere/Duke, on view at Adegbola Gallery in collaboration with Fresco Gallery, is actually trying to do. The show closes July 18, and it's the kind of exhibition that rewards a slow visit.

A Gallery Built on Personal Conviction

For Kayode Adegbola, the lawyer and collector behind Adegbola Gallery, this show wasn't a curatorial experiment so much as an overdue reckoning. He's followed Asidere's work for years — long before he opened a gallery, long before he started collecting it. "I think the time really was right for a proper exhibition that serves Duke's career, and that is what we set out to do," he said.

The gallery's mission, as Adegbola describes it, sits somewhere between personal passion project and institutional ambition: showing beauty, working with archival material, and building serious exhibitions spanning both the primary market for contemporary Nigerian artists and the secondary market for 20th-century Nigerian and African art. Asidere/Duke sits squarely at that intersection — an artist with a four-decade practice getting the kind of survey treatment usually reserved for institutions with far bigger budgets and much longer histories.

The partnership with Fresco Gallery, a specialist in prints and editions across the Nigerian and African art ecosystem, was as much about access as it was about ambition. "The collaboration with Fresco allows people to access editions and collectibles by the artist on the one hand," Adegbola said. "On the other hand, it was also to show that galleries are in a position to collaborate." For Fresco, it marks a milestone in its own right — Asidere's print debut giving collectors a new and more accessible way into a body of work that has largely lived as unique paintings and drawings until now.

Duke Asidere on Making…

Asidere himself pushes back gently on the language usually used to describe an artist's output. Asked why he keeps making work after four decades, he was quick to correct the framing: "Producing is a very dangerous word — don't produce. We create art." For him, the distinction matters. Creating, he said, is closer to learning to swim or learning to drink — an instinct, a form of play, "a fantastic journey" rather than a manufacturing process.

That same instinct shapes how he thinks about showing the work at all. Exhibiting isn't separate from the act of making, in his telling — it's an extension of it, a way for people to encounter something three-dimensionally rather than secondhand. He compared it to tasting chocolate: you can describe it, but putting it in your mouth is a different experience entirely.

Asked why these particular works, now, after some of them have existed for years without being shown, Asidere offered something closer to a philosophy than an explanation: the works themselves have a will to be seen, and this was simply the moment they chose to assert it. "I am just the person who preserves the works," he said. "I'm like somebody who is seeing this show for the first time" — an unusually candid admission from an artist standing in the middle of his own retrospective, looking at a body of work that has been, in his words, "selected and deselected" by forces beyond his control.

The clocks, scattered through his home as much as through the gallery, are where his relationship to time and memory becomes most explicit. Each one is tied to a person or a moment — his son's seventeenth birthday, his daughter's tenth, a piece found on a trip to Delta, a home-made clock now battered and broken but still keeping its dead mother's time. "I don't paint like adults, determining what people might like or not," he said. "Rather, I paint as a child and enjoy it in the process — just as time does its thing, regardless."

Visitors should expect two Asideres in conversation with each other, exactly as the collaborating galleries intended: the instinctive painter working from raw memory and feeling, and the disciplined, formally trained craftsman shaped by his years at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.

Asidere/Duke is on view at Adegbola Gallery, 1619 Danmole Street, Victoria Island, Lagos, in collaboration with Fresco Gallery, through July 18.