Despite the widespread use of back-up generators, electricity blackouts are a frequent feature of Lagos life, often affecting internet connections.
One of the challenges in organising a live auction connecting London and Lagos could be the Nigerian city's unreliable power supplies. I've been in the market for 12 years and it's as strong as I've ever known it," Peppiatt said. "We are quite hopeful about it because the market for Nigerian modern art is really strong at the moment. The work will be sold on February 28, in an auction at Bonhams in London that will be shown live at the Wheatbaker, a boutique hotel popular with artists in Ikoyi, a wealthy neighbourhood of Lagos. The owners did not wish to be identified, he said. Peppiatt said it had come as a shock to him to find the painting hanging in a north London home where he was called to examine it, because he had been on several wild goose chases in the past in search of the originals. "This is a very significant discovery, given my father's contribution to Nigerian art and African art, more broadly," he said. Oliver Enwonwu, the artist's son, is president of the Society of Nigerian Artists. The other two remain lost, although prints first made in the 1970s have been in circulation ever since and the images are familiar to many Nigerians. The Yoruba people, whose homeland is in the southwest, were mostly on the opposing side in the war.Įnwonwu painted three versions of the portrait. The depiction of the Madonna and Child by Filippino. The portrait of Adetutu Ademiluyi, who was a grand-daughter of a revered traditional ruler from the Yoruba ethnic group, holds special significance in Nigeria as a symbol of national reconciliation after the 1967-1970 Biafran War.Įnwonwu belonged to the Igbo ethnic group, the largest in the southeastern region of Nigeria that had tried to secede under the name of Biafra. A LOST masterpiece found hanging above a bed in a bungalow in Enfield has sold for more than 250,000.
"It was his greatest masterpiece and people have been asking 'where is Tutu?' So to have this image turn up is extraordinary," said Giles Peppiatt, an expert in modern and contemporary African art at London auction house Bonhams, who identified the painting. Tutu, by Nigeria's best-known modern artist Ben Enwonwu, was painted in 1974 and appeared at an art show in Lagos the following year but its whereabouts after that were unknown until it re-surfaced in north London. A portrait of a Nigerian princess that was lost for more than 40 years has been found in a London flat and will be sold at an auction screened live in Lagos, allowing Nigerian art lovers to make bids direct from the West African mega-city.
0 kommentar(er)
