North Carolina-based Wole Lagunju is best known for his wide-ranging allegorical works, which associate visual imagery from Western culture with various Nigerian themes, including Guèlèdè masks, typically used by male dancers to disguise themselves as women.
Mirroring the strange thoughts and people previously extrapolated in “We All Live Here”, an installation of his ink drawings with Ed Cross, “Cut From The Same Cloth” attempts to overcome any barrier between two of the artist Wole Lagunju’s most undeniable strands of practice: thoughtfully, and moreover, authentically.
On view until September 28, 2022, in close proximity to new canvas works that chip away at the material, some recognizable contradictory countenances do indeed appear; as delivered with the same kind of oil paint as their neighbors on a similar material surface, their subjects and sensibilities share more in common with their ink-based ancestors.
Applied with a palette knife to lumps of material, Wole Lagunju new series are, in a very real sense, very much the the same as his larger works – shown together, each one illuminates parts of the self in a very different way: they’re not that different, all things considered.
Wole Lagunju has exhibited widely in Nigeria, the United States, Trinidad and Germany. His most recent exhibitions include Yoruba Remixed, Ebonycurated Gallery, Capetown (solo show) 2018, Wole Lagunju: African Diaspora Artist and Transnational Visuality, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia (solo show) 2014, Womanscape: Race, Gender and Sexuality in African Art , University of Texas, Austin Texas, 2011. The artist received a Phillip Ravenhill Fellowship from UCLA in 2006 and a Pollock Krasner Award in 2009.