Mabel (2022)

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Cabinet Office, 70 Whitehall

Made from rough-hewn pieces of wood and painted in vivid pastel colours, Mabel is one of a wider series of portraits created by Awofeso from discarded and scavenged wood pallets, which the artist initially sourced from roadsides and scrap heaps across Johannesburg and later from his native city of Lagos. These pallets, which he marks up with pencil, cuts down to size, staples together and then adorns with richly-coloured paint, are of the type used to transport goods around the world – and it is this function which Awofeso turns into a visual metaphor, both for his own itinerant existence and for human migration more generally. Across Awofeso’s creations, this transformation of objects typically used to transport inanimate commodities between commercial ports into a tool for portraying living people becomes a powerful poetic act.
Mabel is a portrait of an individual Awofeso encountered during his travels. It holds its subject in direct view and offers a vision of a calm and collected individual wearing a vibrant head-wrap, called a Gele, traditional to southern Nigeria and often worn on special occasions. Awofeso captures Mabel in her finery, apprehended mid conversation or as if pausing for thought. With its dynamism and its close attention to the details of her expression, the portrait displays the characteristic tenderness with which Awofeso engages with his subjects and works to distil the spirit of his passing encounters with them.

Abdulrazaq Awofeso was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1978. A sculptor and installation artist, he now lives and works between Birmingham and Lagos, creating small-scale and human-sized sculptures influenced by both cities. Awofeso has shown his work in major exhibitions, including at the Dakar Biennale (2016); Stevenson in Cape Town (2016), Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (2017–18); MAXXI at the National Museum of 21st Century Arts Rome (2018); Museum Arnhem (2020) and Ikon Gallery (2022). Recent exhibitions of his work have taken place at Museum Arnhem, Arnhem (2023) and at London’s Ed Cross (2023), in a show entitled ‘Broad Streets’ exploring parallel city avenues between Lagos and Birmingham. One of his larger works, Avalanche of Calm (2022), composed of several wooden figures of different sizes that litter the floor below a suspended cloud, was featured in the 2023 South London Gallery exhibition Lagos, Peckham, Repeat: Pilgrimage.

Places

Subjects

Materials & Techniques

Artist

Abdulrazaq Awofeso (1978 - )

Title

Mabel (2022)

Date

2022

Medium

Pallet wood, acrylic paint

Dimensions

height: 72 cm; width: 56 cm; depth: 4 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Ed Cross Fine Art Ltd., with funds raised from print sales from the Robson Orr TenTen Award, a GAC/Outset Annual Commission, March 2023

Provenance

Ed Cross Fine Art Ltd.; from whom purchased by the UK Government Art Collection with funds raised from print sales from the Robson Orr TenTen Award, 2023

GAC number

19167