Archiving Nigerian Contemporary Existential Realities: Ben Osaghae and His Dialectical Paintings

Abstract

A greater percentage of contemporary art practice in Nigeria has been adjudged by major Nigerian and foreign art critics, writers, historians and curators to be ahistorical/apolitical and lacking in critical and cutting edge 21st century art making strategies that are prevalent in the West and elsewhere. And although most contemporary Nigerian artists that practice at home use primarily the modernist formalistic modes in expressing concepts that some people consider prosaic and anachronistic, a few of them still engage the contemporary socioeconomic and political experiences and among this small band of artists is Ben Osaghae. Hence, this paper is a critical analysis and contextualization of Osaghae’s paintings that deal with our collective postcolonial experiences which are more abysmal than pleasant.

DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n3p181