Fresco Gallery, in collaboration with Adegbola Gallery, is pleased to present Asidere / Duke, a major exhibition by the prolific Nigerian artist Duke Asidere. Spanning more than four decades of practice, the exhibition explores the dual identities that define his work: the instinctive artist painting from raw emotion, and the disciplined painter shaped by the rigour of art school.
Fresco Gallery, in collaboration with Adegbola Gallery, is pleased to present Asidere / Duke, a major exhibition by the prolific Nigerian artist Duke Asidere. Spanning more than four decades of practice, the exhibition explores the dual identities that define his work: the instinctive artist painting from raw emotion, and the disciplined painter shaped by the rigour of art school.
The strength of this presentation lies in the tension between these two states. One side of Asidere’s practice is driven by memory and impulse, while the other is guided by structure and control. Asidere describes colour as “the complete document of my thoughts,” and throughout the exhibition colour operates less as a formal device than as a way of recording mood, pressure, memory, and reflection.
Trained in Zaria, Asidere belongs to a generation of artists for whom technical seriousness remains central. The exhibition reflects the breadth of his material practice, moving across oil, palette knife, graphite, watercolour, acrylic, ink, and mixed-media processes. Drawing remains at the core of everything he does, acting as the quickest route between thought and surface. Fragments of everyday life, including bank cards, newspaper clippings, and medical prescriptions, also enter the works as quiet reminders of the realities from which the paintings emerge.
Recurring figures and relationships carry much of the emotional weight of the exhibition. Women appear frequently throughout the works, shaped by memories of the women who sustained the homes and communities in which the artist grew up. Friendship, companionship, grief, estrangement, and the complexities of domestic life surface throughout the paintings in different ways. Alongside these personal currents, Asidere’s observations of Nigeria, its failures, contradictions, and injustices, emerge as sharper moments of pressure within the work.
The exhibition includes two limited edition prints, produced by Fresco.
