Tête-à-Tête at Piartworks London Featuring Nigerian Painters
PI Artworks London is delighted to present Tête-à-Tête, a duo exhibition featuring emerging Nigerian contemporary painters Cherry Aribisala (UK) and David Olatoye (Nigeria). Co-curated by Kayode Adegbola and Jade Turanli, this exhibition sparks a dialogue between two artists whose works transcend portraiture and point towards the future of contemporary African art. Coinciding with London Gallery Weekend, the show highlights the distinct styles and influences of these emerging artists.
Cherry Aribisala draws inspiration from comic books and the Pop Art Movement of the 1960s. She creates figurative portraits of Black subjects surrounded by recurring floral motifs. Her new series interweaves escapism, world-building, and visual storytelling, rejecting artistic limitations on media or form.
In contrast, David Olatoye is known for his meticulously executed, stylized portraits. He merges figuration and interior design, blending idealism and highlighting intimate moments. His work focuses on familial relationships, everyday life activities, and daydreaming. His new body of work is an ode to self, exploring life’s uncertainties while honoring self-care. He illustrates a personal visual journey through oblique perspectives and experiments with pictorial space.
Tête-à-Tête demonstrates the power of creativity as an emotional outlet. It calls for new ways to achieve self-liberation despite contemporary life’s constraints and precarity.
