Ngozi-Omeje Ezema, Condition Make Crayfish Bend
kó, Ikoyi · Through 22 August 2026

Five years after Boundless Vases, her previous exhibition at the same gallery, the Nsukka-based artist’s suspended, rounded vessel-like forms have given way to partial, flattened ones. In Condition Make Crayfish Bend, Ezema has hardly abandoned the suspended vessels that look, to some, like outdoor stalactites. The title is echoed in these half forms. Depending on the angle from which you catch them, the ceiling light catches the plastic threads and makes them glimmer, and this adds to the perception of clay going celestial. Whether necessary to its construction or intended to show the support, the suspension mechanism is made conspicuous by the large rectangular frame overhead. A visible chain of dependence is created by the vertical filaments, the slender connective neck and the large body below, in which no constituent part is self-supporting. The minuscule holds the monumental: imposing bodies held aloft by apparently fragile construction. That Ezema sources her clay from mines in Enugu gives the work’s origin story more heft. The provenance resonates in a city whose modern growth was shaped by colonial coal extraction and the railways built to transport it. The work presents in the gallery as meditative, requiring slow looking.

Stephen Tayo, What Comes to Mind When You See the Garment?
ALÁRA, Victoria Island · Presented by FF Projects · Through 20 September

Tayo is a formalist in the service of people. In his new show at Alára, his subject is religiosity as practised by Aladura Christians, whose adherents are readily identified by long white robes and bare feet. Tayo’s deeper interest lies less in the faith’s syncretic elements than in its social choreography, in church and in public. He routinely uses abstract or geometric assemblies to frame and deepen the field of vision around his subject. In Ibadan 11 (2022–ongoing), a little girl in robe and hat is captured sitting on a staircase, in profile. Is she resting? Or taking a genuine break from religious observation, or simply waiting for her parents? It’s poignant without needing to be profound. Behind her, a handrail traces the same logic as her gaze—arriving from the left, settling at the centre, then turning at a right angle into the stairs themselves—so that her white robe, cutting through the frame, continues the line of the window ledge beside it. Through it all, Tayo is more interested in people than the edifice itself: how they walk, talk, possess themselves, when caught in quiet or unaware moments. There’s more care, less curiosity, and more intuition.

Ameh Egwuh, Yellow
Rele, Lagos · Opened 25 July · No closing date announced

A knowledge of synesthesia is not needed to comprehend Yellow, Ameh Egwuh’s current show at Rele, Lagos. So alluring is the colour, and Egwuh’s deployment of it, that it took this viewer some minutes to realise the show’s macabre nature. In one diptych, the eye is drawn to the yellow field of which the figure is composed, to his athletic physique and posture. Only after this pleasure does the eye move down to the machete in his hand, and further down, to the severed head on the floor, his leg standing over one of the victims. If Egwuh appears to be juxtaposing beauty and death in the small plant and bone paintings, it becomes clearer that he is sequencing them. Green plants over a white background occupy the top section, while the lower is a cross-section of dark teal with skeletons laid where one would, in such diagrams, find roots. Not contrast but dependence: the perished nourish the living. In both sets of works, the eye travels the same route from body to machete to severed head, leaf to stem to bone. Death is encountered in Yellow, but only after passing through beauty.