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Artwork Description:

The Union is a stylistic blend of realism and onaism aesthetics standard acrylic painting on canvas. It is the story of eight women union dressed in uniform attires of white tops and bluish-green wrappers. They are in a celebrative mood because it is a special day and occasion whenever they have to meet for their union meeting. At times, they also visit friends and relatives who are usually from their South-south or Southeastern part of Nigeria. While the eight women in the foreground are realistically rendered, traditional African art patterns that symbolized Nigerian/African creative cultural essence in an onaism standard were also employed to assert the atavistic milieu, beauty and reality of the work. The numerous patterns/symbols crisscross from the background to the foreground of the painting from an abstracted realm into the contemporary reality of the union of eight singing, dancing and happy women. The traditional African patterns added the desired cultural significance that innately symbolized the cultural essence of the ‘Union’. Masked abstracted and stylized faces were expressed in the onaism-inspired background of the painting. The patterns contextually portray that humans are nothing without their culture, which is synonymous with our existence and Godliness. Thus, “The Union” essentially captures our world's real, surreal and spiritual reality from the realistic to the onaism abstracted fact of our modernity.

Artist Bio:

Rasheed Adedamola Amodu was born in the sixties in Surulere, Lagos. He has a B.A. in Fine Arts, specializing in painting, from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, in 1991, and an M.A., specializing in African Studies-Visual Art, in 2001 from the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, and an M.Phil. in