Platform: Edozie Anedu

In Allegory, Anedu sets out to dissect and disrupt unexamined beliefs, and hold a mirror to the circuitry of social norms to reveal its distorted shadows. In a series of high-energy tableau vivant paintings, Allegory revisits scenarios from Anedu’s childhood and borrows from popular culture to set a provocative visual stage. Drawing inspiration from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, each tableau serves as a contemporary cave, upon whose walls we are called to self reflect Anedu inserts symbolic absurdities aimed to draw us in and make us think. His heavily layered childlike strokes are a form of witness to Anedu’s personal practice of fine tuning his own perspectives. As he revisits his lines and prolific colors, perfecting their expressive form through trial and error, the materialised painting inself is a testament to the rewarding labour of self inquiry.

Rendered in a bright, dramatic palette, Anedu also references secular tropes found in films like Osuofia in London, or popular songs like “Onuigbo” by Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe, which both reference ambitions to move abroad to the west for a dream life. He masterfully captures movement of bodies and ideas and a mystical sense of time within the flattened perspective of each painting. It is Anedu’s aim that Allegory prompts us to ask questions of ourselves, our beliefs in order to address and heal social inequality.

Edozie Anedu is a self taught artist based in Benin City, Nigeria. Working primarily with oils, acrylics, pastels and recycled materials, Anedu’s paintings employ elemental forms and figures that verge on the abstract. He references graffiti and mural art traditions to focus his work on popular culture, music and fashion, socio political ideologies and the human condition. 

Drawing from personal experience, Anedu’s unflinching use of colour and often aggressive brush strokes express a freedom of emotion that commands the attention. His childlike and seemingly haphazard strokes are in conversation with his own coming of age story - a journey of excitement, adjustments and hopeful rush to the future. His work embraces a synthesis of iinnocence, trial and error, memory and melancholy.