The Umberman, a multimedia collection by self-taught Yorùbá artist Babájídé Ọlátúnjí, emerges from and documents the lived experiences of a dark-skinned individual across a lifetime: his search
for mentorship and meaning in boyhood, the undulations of love, the loss of family, and the displacement of migration – all subsumed by the constant, inevitable, and irreversible march of time.
DATE SHOWN
The project draws inspiration from Babájídé’s earliest encounters with art and music: his older brother Olumide’s sketches and weekend mornings spent with music from his father’s vinyl record collection.
“My first memory of witnessing art was either my older brother, Olumide’s expressive caricature heads or Sunny Ade’s insistent guitar rhythms on my father’s Sony vinyl player; very early 90s.”
With The Umberman, Babájídé explores familiar terrain through a new medium: a suite of 10 oil-on-copper paintings paired with 10 original songs – his first public musical composition.
Of the work, he says:
“Consider The Umberman a building. Some rooms are empty, lit by a single 40 watt bulb, furnish them. Others are baroque and overstuffed, others shift like mirages through a kaleidoscope.”
ABOUT
Babájídé Ọlátúnjí is a Nigerian-born, London-based studio artist, songwriter and singer, working from studios in London and Ìbàdàn, Nigeria. A self-taught painter with a background in Botany from Ọbáfẹ́mi Awólọ́wọ̀ University, Ilé-Ifẹ̀, he has spent over a decade developing a practice inspired by the art and antiquities of South Western Nigeria and the old masters. His portraits and narrative paintings draw on Yorùbá culture and mythology to explore universal human questions, executed in charcoal, pastels, paint and ground cowrie shells, with his outsized hyperrealistic chalk pastel portraits a signature of his studio work.
His work has been exhibited internationally and is held in public and private collections across the UK, Europe, Africa, China and the US, including the Bank of England Museum and the Mott-Warsh Collection. He was selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2017, and his monumental History of the Yorùbás was unveiled at the John Randle Centre for Yorùbá Culture & History in Lagos. His latest work, The Umberman, marks a new chapter, pairing ten paintings with original compositions to trace the stations of an umber coloured man’s journey in search of meaning, inviting audiences to look, listen and reflect.
