Abe Odedina: 'True Love and Other Stories' is open at 19 Garrett Street, in gallery 1, October 3-9. Odedina's salon presentation (gallery 2) continues until November 9.
Ed Cross is delighted to present True Love and Other Stories, an exhibition of new and historic paintings by Abe Odedina. The show includes Odedina's iconic triptych True Love, commissioned by Danny Boyle and shown in a digital format at The Carnegie Hall in 2017, alongside a number of major new paintings from 2022 and selected earlier works.
Born 1960 in Ibadan, Nigeria, now living and working between London and Salvador Bahia in Brazil, Odedina's practice draws on diverse traditions. Revelling in their specificities, Odedina's work pulses with an equal and opposite universality - there remains much more to unite diverse groups of people and their ideas than to divide them.
That philosophy is writ large in the legibility of his paintings: working on board rather than canvas, Odedina's compositions embody all the solidity - and practicality - of shop fronts or municipal murals. Compositional elements of Renaissance portraiture, devotional painting and even pop art frame figures from diverse mythologies (Yoruba, Haitian, Ancient Greek) as well as passers-by or characters plucked from the artist's own imagination.
In True Love and Other Stories, Odedina's irresistible instinct for narrative collides with some of our oldest iterations - fairy tales like Beauty and the Beast, concepts as enduring as true love itself, are not so much reimagined as distilled by Odedina's unmistakable aesthetic shorthand.
Ed Cross, Director, writes, "For Odedina, it's about the single-minded honing of a language: yet, his project is not concerned with the language itself but rather about the ideas being discussed in it, the notions being challenged by it. These paintings that please the eye on a graphic level are revolutionary in a way that only art can be- resolutely ambiguous on the one hand, but nonetheless brimming with concrete elements that the viewer can engage with if they choose to.
There is a big world out there; there are always other shores and other stories. The protagonists in Odedina's paintings are aware of this - they may be central in their particular tableau but the compositions are constructed to make their viewer appreciate that they are only seeing a fraction of a bigger picture. The twins doing their marvellous contortionist exercises in Backbone, for instance, are situated in a safe domestic space behind a fence, beyond which a dazzling landscape remains quite indifferent to their activities. In a sense,Odedina's work is everything that social media isn't:for the most part, his painting-like frames celebrate the exploits of the individual, one whose context is infinite numbers of images with similar purposes.
While platforms like Instagram have created a global appetite for imagery and played a major part in popularising artists, including Odedina, the starting point for his work stands in opposition to the "selfie" ethos. For the artist, it is the view through the window and into the world that is important, not the view in the mirror. With their strong graphic compositions that work so well on Instagram feeds, his paintings can be toolkits for unpacking contemporary orthodoxies as well as acquainting viewers with the power and wisdom of humanity's copious gods.
Odedina's project is multifaceted. Underpinning all of it is what he considers his birthright as a human being and an artist - the freedom to take inspiration from anywhere that he pleases."
