• Edozie Anedu’s latest body of work (Allegory) is an etymology of symbols. Referencing popular culture and religious iconography, he investigates...

    Edozie Anedu in 2020

    Edozie Anedu’s latest body of work (Allegory) is an etymology of symbols. Referencing popular culture and religious iconography, he investigates how meaning is made and held in the collective unconscious. “It’s like learning a language. First you learn the alphabet, then you learn to spell, then you learn to put sentences together.” Anedu’s earliest exposure to art was through the Catholic church. He was moved by the indulgent artistry of Biblical tableaux, emotive iconography and opulent mass. He later became aware of the intimate relationship between the advancement of doctrine and the proliferation of (religious) icons and questioned how much free agency is given to them.

  • 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.

  • Artworks

    • Hold the Fort for I am Coming, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 150 x 150 cm
      Hold the Fort for I am Coming, 2021
      Acrylic on canvas
      150 x 150 cm
    • Onuigbo in London, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 123 x 79 cm
      Onuigbo in London, 2021
      Acrylic on canvas
      123 x 79 cm
    • Les Comédiens, Live Performance, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 105 x 125 cm
      Les Comédiens, Live Performance, 2021
      Acrylic on canvas
      105 x 125 cm
  • Installs

  • About the Artist

    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.

  • Charity, Street Project Foundation - Lagos, Nigeria

    Charity

    Street Project Foundation - Lagos, Nigeria

    The street project foundation in Lagos, Nigeria aims to facilitate opportunities for youth employment, social mobilization and cross-cultural dialogue using creative arts as a tool. They see a worls in which a critical mass of transformational "Youth Leaders" making a sustainable living by doing what they love.