A double-decker bus spray-painted with cartoon faces greets visitors to the Somerset House courtyard this autumn at the return of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair. The courtyard commission this year was granted to young artist Olaolu Slawn (b. 2000), whose street art has garnered him a staggering number of Instagram followers and significant fashion world cachet. The British iconography of the double-decker bus told incomers that Slawn and 1-54 were taking an expanded view of contemporary African art, paying homage to African artists in the diaspora. Of course, the reluctant artist might just reject such grand intentions, the enfant terrible’s Instagram bio reading “Im not an artist, i paint like a 6 year old”.
The centerpiece of 1-54 had certainly changed, but little else seemed different this year; indeed, a few galleries were showing the same pieces they had last year. I found myself considering this whilst I wandered around the sixty or so booths. Similar to last year, Black figurative painting was the order of the day—the most successful of these were the most figuratively experimental; those who, like John Baptiste-Oduor noted in his January 2024 essay for Frieze on contemporary black figurative painting, saw “the depiction of black figures as a formal problem.”
One of my favorites was Abe Obedina at Ed Cross, his abstractly rounded figures, reminiscent of Edward Burra and Beryl Cook, depicted in dirty scuffed colors. His characters felt caught in the act, Michael Fried might say that they felt absorbed. One somewhat moving painting at the far end of the booth was long and skinny and showed a ladder reaching upwards to the heavens, Black feet hanging from the top. Another featured a suited man thigh-deep in water holding a golden-scaled fish. Another highlight amongst the painters was Nicholas Coleman at AM/PM whose doleful seaside self-portraits spoke to, as his gallery described, the distance and connection of landmasses and the transatlantic slave trade.
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My favorite works at the fair were exhibited by itinerant gallery The Gallery of Everything, which showed pieces by Abu Bakkar Mansaré and Emmanuel Bottalata. Mansaré’s The Secret and Invention of Coronavirus (2023) included two pieces, one graphic and one text-based, detailing a fantastical and conspiratorial birth of the coronavirus pandemic, the two daring blueprints felt entirely original and showed an edge and a nerve that was somewhat muted at the fair. Bottalata showed three-dimensional maps illustrating political issues in the Democratic Republic of Congo, from evangelism to corruption and congestion, in an innovative and evocative fashion.
Across the hallway from The Gallery of Everything, nestled amongst the art fair, was a separate Somerset House exhibition, “Rukus!,” a study of gay Black British art and activism since the 1970s. I inadvertently spent a lot of time in this provocative and inspiring corner of the building. It made for an unfortunate contrast. A conspicuous lack of challenging or experimental works at 1-54 made it a somewhat pedestrian affair this year. The motivations behind 1-54 and the platform provided to African galleries and artists remain important and laudable, but I hoped to see more of the spunk that Abu Bakkar Mansaré and Emmanuel Bottalata brought to the fair. Work like Looty’s, which last year reappropriated stolen works such as the Rosetta Stone, pushed the fair into a more engaging place, making it both event and art fair. This year, I left with a somewhat lukewarm feeling.