kó presents Modupeola Fadugba at The Armory Show
Solo Booth by Modupeola Fadugba
September 8–10, 2023
kó presents Modupeola Fadugba at The Armory Show
Modupeola Fadugba (born 1985 in Lomé, Togo) is a Nigerian multimedia artist working in painting, drawing, and socially-engaged installation. Her works explore cultural identity, social justice, game theory, and the art world within the socio-political landscape of Nigeria and the greater global economy.
This presentation features new mixed media paintings, uniting various bodies of work by Fadugba that delve into the concept of water and the swimming pool as a contested dialectical site full of possibilities for liberation and community-building.
Originally trained in Chemical Engineering, the artist employs a unique technical skill-set to bring her surfaces to life, activating material science as a form of storytelling.
Through the delicate burning of paper and incorporation of a variety of materials such as gold leaf, graphite, ink, acrylic, and oil, Fadugba explores the spatial composition and geometric patterns of swimming pools, experimenting with ideas of time, texture, and the tension between a work’s surface and the ideas lurking beneath.
In her ongoing series Synchronized Swimmers, the artist is inspired by the collaborative feat of bodies moving and working together in water as a metaphor for personal identity and collective empowerment. The figures in these works are often inspired by archival footage of historic Olympic team performances and are often anonymously matching in appearance, emphasizing their sense of unity and shared purpose over individualism. In her standalone portraits and newest series Reflections, however, Fadugba turns to documenting members of her own family and studio team, creating a bridge between life and art, the personal and universal.
For her seminal solo exhibition Dreams from the Deep End in 2018, Fadugba worked with the Harlem Honeys and Bears, an all-Black senior synchronized swimming team based in New York. Inspired by the history of the American public pool –a socially contested space fraught with tensions regarding access and autonomy– this body of work tells stories of survival, community, learning, togetherness, and play. A new portrait on display from this ongoing series, Lady in Red, 2023, is visually crowned in gold and embraced by the striking red of the group’s swim uniform.
This recurring muse and mentor of the artist sits in direct dialogue with Fadugba’s own grandmother, tranquil yet tentative, alongside a precocious infant in Swim School, 2023, the masterful synchronized swimmers, and the meditative young women in Reflections. These final contemplative subjects –based on young women the artist works with in Nigeria who learned to swim as part of the communal studio process– gaze into the water’s shimmering surface, oscillating between the abstract and the representational. Together, they tell an intergenerational story, where swimmers, alone or together, create a community holding a spectrum of transcendent experiences, from fear and fatigue to leisure and radical joy.
Stargazers
2022
Acrylic, graphite, ink, and metal leaf on burned canvas
74 x 45 in. | 188 x 114.3 cm
Description
Stargazers depicts black waters with a tiled background alluding to a vast sky above. The six synchronized swimmers are all facing the same direction with their backs to us, looking upwards and showing off their intricate crown-like hairstyles. These women are leaping out of the water with poise, dignity, and triumphance. There is a double meaning insofar as these elegant swimmers are gazing up at the stars, whilst also being the stars of the show, We’re stargazers admiring their physical feat, and so are they with a nod towards metaphysical hope and possibility.
Merry Go Round in Gold
2022
Acrylic, graphite, ink, and metal leaf on burned canvas
88 x 46.5 in. | 223.5 x 118 cm
Background Information
Description
Now We Are Just Showing Off
2022
Acrylic, graphite, ink, and metal leaf on burned canvas
45 x 52 in. | 114.4 x 132 cm
Background
Synchronized Swimmers employ a characteristic visual tool of Fadugba to create ornate, fastidious details to connote real-life experiences whilst also inviting viewers to look closer. For example, her painstakingly rendered braids and cornrows in graphite depict the real-life experience of women protecting their hair from the destruction swimming brings, whilst also symbolically crowning them with spectacular designs. It also represents the artist’s investigation of hair with regards to cultural representation. Braiding hair was actually Fadugba’s first form of income and she harks back to this as a bonding experience learning about women’s lives while taking care of each other. This is in keeping with the artist’s interest in the cross-pollination of personal and political contexts.
Description
This is another work from the Showtime Girls series, playfully referencing the idea of showing off and showing up in the title. It features the special Backbend Olympic position and references an earlier composition from 2017 – How To Do A Four Head Bend. It is a representation of literal and figurative support, strength, and defying gravity.
The shape of the frame also formally references Fadugba’s Flowers and Prayers, series from 2017, featuring cathedral windows that reference mediaeval compositions trying to fit as many figures as possible in a space. This special dome-shaped work similarly creatively contains this unique pose.
Lifeguards Off Duty
2022
Acrylic, oil, graphite, ink, and metal leaf on burned canvas
74 x 43 in. | 188 x 109.2 cm
Background
Heroic lifeguards are frequent motifs in Fadugba’s swimming paintings, representing real-life heroes that employ teaching and care. They summon two key literary references informing the artist’s practice: Simon Sineck’s The Infinite Game (about how game theory pertains to business, with known and unknown players, changeable rules, and no end. “The objective is not to win—the objective is to keep playing”) and Leaders Eat Last (“the ultimate guide to building a strong and inspiring team, and creating a supportive work environment, where everyone can thrive ''). Both serve as major points of research and inspiration about what leadership needs to look like to work in the 21st century.
Description
This work employs another iconic colour combo by the artist featuring red bathing suits in golden waters. The image portrays a group photograph where young female lifeguards aren’t performing, but are rather just gathered together in a moment for a group photograph.
Silver Side Up?
2023
Acrylic and graphite on burned canvas
48 x 70 in. | 122 x 178 cm
Description
In Olympic synchronised swimming performances, a lot of the action takes place underwater with spectators only seeing the powerful legs of the athletes. This painting is set in two planes to give you the full picture – what’s above and what’s below, where despite being hidden there is still so much technique and coordination.
This piece stands out within this new body of work considering its unique colour palette incorporating silver and purple. The detailed mosaic confetti tiles one finds often comprising swimming pools summon the appearance of a Birthday Cake with naked layers, sprinkles, candles, imbuing this work as one of celebration.
Swim School
2020
Graphite, ink, and acrylic on burnt canvas
42 in. diameter | 106.7 cm diameter
Background
Fadugba’s acclaimed project The People’s Algorithm, an immersive installation set within a giant Rubik's Cube structure. Participants are invited to join in an interactive game seeking to address the critical situation of education and unemployment in Nigeria. Once inside, you choose between playing as a teacher, student, or policymaker, and then embark upon a series of competitive activities – collecting data, experiencing challenges, or presenting solutions – that empower all involved to learn, question, and make a difference together. Despite its aesthetic divergence from her works on paper and canvas, The People’s Algorithm physically manifests the heart of Fadugba's overarching practice and mission: to activate participants through a cultural exchange of reflexive criticality and collectiveness where we are always in motion, ready to decipher and play.
Before starting full-time studio practice in 2014, Fadugba worked for 6 years in education and administration, which has deeply affected her art practice. employment as Director of Student Affairs at the African University of Science & Technology (Abuja) and engagement with an initiative teaching marginalised Nigerian girls business skills formed the foundation of her unique development perspective. Through her artistic practice, she assumes the role of a revolutionary philosopher-teacher. Furthermore, as an avid and lifelong swimmer, artist Modupeola Fadugba has a profound personal affinity for the pool and its capacity to foster health, creativity, and confidence.
Description
Swim School references a special enduring project in Fadugba’s practice, all about learning and teaching. It stems from a generative ideology that self-help leads to helping others, just like how the artist learning to swim has led her to create a whole creative ecosystem teaching others the same.
In this touching work A mother is holding out to her baby girl who is learning to swim and moving towards her. The baby is just under the water but we can see her charming Mickey Mouse double bun hairstyle, giving the work a sense of joy. Fadugba takes on the potentially fearful nature of this acts and tenderly depicts how it can be fun. Furthermore, this powerful yet playful intergenerational moment embodies the artist’s interest in skill sharing, knowledge, and care as forms of sustainable community building.
Bronze Reflections: Beside Unstill Waters
2023
Acrylic, ink, and metal leaf on canvas
72 x 45.5 in. | 183 x 115.6 cm
Background
In 2018-2019 Fadugba set out with a formal research question: how could she achieve contrast within a limited scope of a monochromatic metallic palette? This led to her new, luminous Reflections series, whereby realist figures occupy the top half of the composition with abstract renderings below. The latter technique builds upon the artist’s enduring formal experimentation of depicting water, turning to artists the likes of David Hockney known for his iconic depictions of aquatic surfaces.
This series further builds upon the artist’s practice of depicting detailed figurative swimmers to centre the importance of diverse representation through painting, alongside peers she admires such as Derrick Adams, Calida Rawles, Derrick Fordour, and Phoebe Boswell, amongst others. Swimmers come to life in these painstakingly rendered portraits, and intimate multimedia documentation. This new series thus presents a unique development of reverent realism in Fadugba’s artistic practice, reflecting her aspiration to empower individual bodies and voices in this resilient community.
Description
In her new Reflections series, Fadugba turns to documenting members of her own family and studio team, creating a bridge between life and art, the personal and universal, realistic and the abstract.
These tenderly rendered portraits communicate a darker palette suggesting contemplation, playing with the different layers of where reflections means: physical, metaphysical, personal, and abstract.
Beside Until Waters depicts two young women from the artist’s studio in a thoughtful moment at ease, depicting how friends can reflect individually and together while still being in a moment. The abstract explosion of shapes dancing on the water’s surface signifies a more metaphysical interpretation of this unique instance. These two worlds – realistic and abstract – are connected by the figure on the left, whose leg is under the water. This gesture creates a portal, whereby the moment of activation, the reflection, is a part of her.
Bronze Reflections: Out of my Depth
2023
Acrylic, graphite, ink, and metal leaf on burned canvas
72 x 45.5 in. | 183 x 115.6 cm
Description
Here we see a composition from the Reflection Series featuring a solitary figure rather than a group formation. Fadugba thus invites an even more meditative and insular moment for reflection. We see this poignant figure thinking about something by herself, at ease, looking away and thereby physically removed from reflection. Her foot laying atop the water still connects her, as if creating a portal between the past, present, and future. It is an invitation for the audience to bring their own experience and thoughts to the work, and ask: what are we reflecting on now?
Lady in Red
2023
Acrylic and leaf on canvas
48 x 72 in. | 122 x 183 cm
Background
For her seminal solo exhibition Dreams from the Deep End in 2018, Fadugba worked with the Harlem Honeys and Bears, an all-Black senior synchronized swimming team based in New York. Inspired by the history of the American public pool –a socially contested space fraught with tensions regarding access and autonomy– this body of work tells stories of survival, community, learning, togetherness, and play. Her research has been greatly informed by Jeff Wiltse’s publication Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools, which explores the history of public pools and their privatisation, in relation to race politics and community life in America.
Since this exhibition, the inspiring 100 year-old Miss Lettice (the oldest member of the team) has been a hero and muse to the artist. She plays narrator to questions about race, gender, and age within the contexts of competitive sports, service industries, and American Beauty Pageantry. In exploring the representation and legacy of Miss Lettice, Fadugba builds connections between the individual (one woman's story – hero, muse); the national (contested and complicated histories of racial exclusion, gender rights, privatisation of the public, the American Dream); and the global (how bodies of water serve as a sites for both nightmares and dreams).
Description
This new portrait on display from the artist’s ongoing Dreams from the Deep End this ongoing series, Lady in Red, 2023, features the artist’s beloved muse Miss Lettice, visually crowned in gold and embraced by the striking red of the group’s swim uniform. In this work Fadugba pays tribute to a special visit she had with Miss Lettice in 2018 when together they watched the Miss America competition and were especially taken with Miss New York, a beautiful dark-skinned woman who won that year, who wore a red dress and sang as her talent. Miss Lettice, a former Queen herself, was deeply inspired by how far the pageant world has come in terms of diverse representation and expansive notions of beauty and power.
For the Armory presentation, this recurring muse and mentor of the artist sits in direct dialogue with Fadugba’s own grandmother, tranquil yet tentative, alongside the precocious infant in Swim School, 2023, the masterful synchronized swimmers, and the meditative young women in Reflections.
Walk Before you Swim
2023
Acrylic and graphite on burned canvas
72 x 45.5 in. | 183 x 115.6 cm
Background
The artist’s practice, often materialising itself on delicate burnt paper, is intrinsically related to time, texture, and the tension between a work’s surface and the ideas lurking beneath. Fadugba's fascinating technique of burning patches into her intricate pencil and ink paper works draws on memories of seeing holes and craters on bombed out buildings in Rwanda after the genocide; she spent many a school holiday visiting her parents in Kigali, where they worked for the Criminal Tribunal. These deep visual memories appear as burn patches in her art, reminding us of the fragility of life and the physical and emotional scars which remain forever.
Throughout Fadugba’s practice the swimming pool is a nostalgic yet contested space where communities gather to play, learn, rest, and resist. Yet within this watery oasis there also lurks more turbulent experiences of risk, exclusion, and the looming chance of drowning.
Description
This special family portrait features Fadugba’s own grandmother. It is based on a recent, intimate real-life moment, with the artist cajoling her grandma to see and sit by the pool outside her studio in Ibadan. Unlike the confident, capable synchronised swimmers often gracing the artist’s canvas, this figure represents a more tentative and tenuous relationship with water and swimming. Fadugba’s grandmother didn’t even know, for instance, that her granddaughter has a swimming pool and was teaching all the members of the studio – as she typically prefers the safety and comfort of indoors. This moment of Grandma summoning the courage to sit by this contested space represents a transcendent moment of trust.
In keeping with her use of pools as loaded, symbolic spaces holding many nuanced experiences and perspectives, Fadugba has employed a special rendering technique to create physical perspective through a spider-web like technique. With the point of origin taking place outside the frame, the steps of the pool open out towards us, as if welcoming us to sit next to Grandma and feel safe to physically and conceptually access this space. Moreover, the iconic burning technique lends a timeless quality to this work, whereby the personal may be universal.
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