Abe Odedina has always painted from life, in more ways than one. His first major publication, Abe Odedina: Love and Hate, is published by Ed Cross Books and surveys the artist’s practice from 2013 to 2020. Featuring more than 150 paintings, as well as texts by Katherine Finerty, David Remfry RA, Adjoa Armah, Edward Cross, and Emily Watkins, Love and Hate dives into Odedina’s vibrantly uncanny universe and invites the viewer to find themselves between its pages.
Self-taught Odedina works with acrylic on board – sterling or plywood – to conjure a mythology at once timeless and decidedly specific to place and present. Tattooed from head to toe, the artist’s practice is literally embodied. Playfully interrogating the Western canon and its superstitious attitude to the art object, his philosophy is as accessible as it is palimpsestic. Love and Hate represents an expansion of that appeal and reach; a storybook, as much as an archive and an object in its own right.
Comic strips and street murals; religious icons, votive offerings, and fetish objects; Vermeer’s tender everyman, and the pop art irreverence of Andy Warhol’s soup tins; Odedina’s tableaus are as immediate as they are richly communicative. It is in that spirit of dialogue that Love and Hate sets his paintings in conversation – with one another, and the world they’re born to synthesize.
Established in 2009, Ed Cross Fine Art works with emerging and established artists across and beyond the African diaspora. The gallery seeks to stage conversations – between practitioners, international audiences and as guided by its artists – to amplify voices historically silenced, and to create space for their independent development.
For further information on the artist and gallery, please visit https://www.edcrossfineart.com/
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