The Breeder
1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair Paris

The Breeder is pleased to present highlights from our recent and upcoming program including works by Adegboyega Adesina, Larry Amponsah, Kenechukwu Victor, Johnson Ocheja and Deborah Segun.

ADEGBOYEGA ADESINA
Adegboyega Adesina (b. 1998, Nigeria) creates intimate portraits of Black subjects featuring rich color palettes and a dynamic sense of personality. The works present a complex but highly personal investigation of Nigeria seen through the lens of his personal history, his people and the cultures, traditions and political views shaping his country. Adesina produces paintings that create an intriguing dialogue between the subject’s message and the viewer, ultimately declaring the confidence and pride of his people. He describes his work ‘as a form of energy transfer from myself to the canvas. This is quite therapeutic for me as my works are masked emotions triggered by events that affect me directly or indirectly, hence creating a space for my imaginations and reality to coexist’.

LARRY AMPONSAH
Larry Amponsah’s work (born 1989 in Ghana, lives and works in London, UK) investigates modes of image- making to look at the politics of imagery. Amponsah has a special interest in collage, a technique he often uses in his work, which derives from his early fascination about how popular themed calendars are laid upon each other, year after year, on the walls of modest Ghanaian homes, offices and shops – creating what he sees an uncanny but truthful representation of a changing nation. Cutting into the hundreds of stereotyped images of “White beauty” typically echoed in these glossy fashion magazines – Amponsah reassembled and glued them into vibrant A3 collages- morphing the original pictures into a series of compelling portraits of Black people that reference his West African upbringing and the greater global Black Diaspora narratives. The result is a new series of portraits which introduce Amponsah’s vision of “true representations of contemporary Blackness that challenge the global stereotypical ideologies historically associated with people of African origin”. With references to materiality, identity and culture, they display a rich community of people that conjures ideas of fluidity, energy, complexity and mystery.
Amponsah’s solo exhibition “GENESIS: The Plan & The Promise” is currently on view at The Breeder in Athens (March-April 2022).

KENECHUKWU VICTOR
Kenechukwu Victor (born 1995, lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria) approaches portraiture as an act of storytelling. Combining personal narratives and interpretations with elements of Nigerian culture, symbols, and idioms, the artist renders his subjects through iconographic lens. This unique visual language is part of Kenechukwu Victor’s ongoing pursuit of the truth, revealing the complex relationship between our interior worlds and the external environments that we inhabit.
Each of Victor’s portraits is adorned with the same signature look: titanium white hair and lips. This striking feature is a reference to “Nzu”, a type of calabash chalk that is used for a variety of religious, medicinal, and recreational purposes across West Africa. Victor incorporates Nzu as a way to imbue his subjects with wisdom, peace, and purity; what the artist describes as a “seal of truth”. Placed against blank or ornamental backgrounds – a yellow brick wall, a black and white tiled floor, an overgrown fence – the figures gaze directly back at the viewer, claiming agency over their stories.

JOHNSON OCHEJA
Johnson Ocheja (B. 1993, Kogi State, Nigeria) is a Nigerian self-taught artist from an Igala speaking community.
He paints detailed scenes of black subjects with blue pigment and in impasto technique with his fingers thereby producing marks on the skin of his subjects inspired by scarification, an African cultural practice.
His portraits highlight black consciousness and black beauty. Based on photographs that the artist took or sourced online, his new series of paintings, focus on traditional African hairstyles and their symbolic resonance in the construction of meaning around his subjects’ identity.

DEBORAH SEGUN
Firmly rooted in her personal experiences, Deborah Segun’s work celebrates the diverse bodies of women through shape and color, portraiture and narrative, creating an important counter-point to both art historical and contemporary depictions of the female form. The artist articulates the language of abstraction and more specifically the visual vocabulary of cubism to narrate the stories of her subjects which seem at once powerful and vulnerable. Her canvases are populated by the figures of voluptuous black women in varied graceful poses accompanied by titles like Longing and Trauma Bonding that offer us a window into the inner workings of her protagonists. Segun ultimately explores portraiture from a place of body sensitivity, shaping narratives around the power of vulnerability as a birthplace of joy, belonging, creativity and authenticity.

Deborah Segun (b. 1994, Nigeria) lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria. She obtained a degree in Fashion Design at the Polimoda Institute of Fashion Design and Marketing in Florence, Italy in 2017. In 2022, The Breeder Gallery will present Deborah Segun’s first solo exhibition in Athens. Her work is included in the collection of X Museum in Beijing and of Xiao Museum also in China.