The ‘Evolving currents’ of two teachers, two generations

Sixty-one year old Sculptor, Raqib Bashorun and forty-two year old painter, Chika Idu were out to thrill Nigerians with a number of creativities they put together in a joint exhibition at the Wheatbaker Hotel, Lagos. Tagged, ‘Evolving Currents,’ the duo who are arts teachers said the exhibition aimed to capture creative originality as well as […]

Sixty-one year old Sculptor, Raqib Bashorun and forty-two year old painter, Chika Idu were out to thrill Nigerians with a number of creativities they put together in a joint exhibition at the Wheatbaker Hotel, Lagos.
Tagged, ‘Evolving Currents,’ the duo who are arts teachers said the exhibition aimed to capture creative originality as well as professional finesse.
Giving an insight into the works displayed, Bashorun said: “Most of my works addresses political issues and the power of numbers. Nigeria has over 150 million people. I use repetition in my work to address this issue.  We are wasting our power of numbers.  We need to harness and use the power of numbers for our own advantage.”
On his part, Idu said his works focus on the rights of women through his portrait series, and an intense study of the plight of children living in coastal communities.
“I spent a lot of time watching children play.  Children are often brushed aside, not given the respect they deserve, and their voices are not heard. Due to our bad roads and traffic, I started taking the ferry to the Island. What I saw was defecation, waste, and refuse going in to the water while in the same vicinity, children swam and women came to fetch water. This really troubled me,” he said.
“The works presented are in the varying media of sculpture, installation, oil and acrylic on canvas, and water colour on paper,” Sandra Mbanefo Obiago, one of the exhibition’s curators said. “The exhibition is suggestive of creative currents that continue to flow between consecutive generations of artists.”
According to Obiago, this notion of interconnectedness is further accentuated by the fact that though the artists work across different media and are separated by age, Idu being considerably younger, they are brought together through several points of investigation of their intriguing art forms.
On Bashorun, Obiago said the 61-year old artist belongs to an exceptional, but older established generation of sculptors who have firmly inculcated the practice of employing unconventional techniques and media including recycled and found materials in their interrogation of the larger society.
“As so often with his previous installations, the 14 works presented here are fashioned from his preferred media of wood and metal. However, in the last decade, Bashorun has increasingly explored new directions and possibilities with the incorporation of recycled and found material from his immediate environment, most notably metal in form of aerosol and soda cans, as well as domestic accessories like table cutlery,” Obiago said.
On his part, Oliver Enwonwu, another curator for the exhibition, described Idu’s works as strongly figurative and personal styled because they are easily recognizable.
“Idu’s technique involves the exhaustive priming of his canvas. His broad oeuvre embraces themes such as traditional Nigerian ceremonies, musicians and landscapes. Several of his paintings are imbued with narrative content. They depict children engaging in various forms of activity-on the way to school, praying, reading or swimming. Idu is also an accomplished portraitist. His canvases portraying the beauty of the African woman with her pouted lips and lithe supple body are built up thickly with palette knife and sometimes fingers,” Enwonwu said.
The curators added that the exhibition which is being sponsored  by Wheatbaker Hotel and Veuve Clicquot, has its strength hinged on the juxtaposed placement of each artist’s work; the geometric and abstract forms, as well as the rigidity and hardness of Bashorun’s sculpture against the palpable impasto, delineating the more fluid figures and forms that populate Idu’s 26 canvases.
“Significantly, both artists are united by each other’s interest in the texture and materiality of his chosen media,” Enwonwu said.
Bashorun is a retired art lecturer of Yabatech, Lagos while Idu who is instrumental to the creation of Defactori Studios also teaches a new generation of artists.