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July Spotlight Artists: Hassan Wasiu Sunday, John Akande, and Omoyeni Arogunmati
- THE.CCART
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
This July, THE.CCART collaborates with BILARTERAL to spotlight three artists whose work celebrates African culture, identity, and emotional storytelling through vibrant, distinctive visual language. Through this collaboration, THE.CCART is proud to showcase Hassan Wasiu Sunday, John Akande, and Omoyeni Arogunmati, three artists championed by BILARTERAL whose practices span realism, abstraction, and figurative expressionism. Together, their work reflects a shared commitment to honouring heritage while pushing the boundaries of contemporary African art.
Hassan Wasiu Sunday: Heritage, Resilience, and Aesthetic Storytelling
Hassan Wasiu Sunday is a Nigerian visual artist born and raised in Ibadan, Oyo State, with a artistic foundation built through formal training at Heritage Creations under the mentorship of Godwin Segun Adesope, followed by studies at Adeseun Ogundoyin Polytechnic and the Polytechnic, Ibadan. His practice has been further shaped through residencies at the Centre for African Art and Design Gallery and the TR Residency Program in Lekki, Lagos.
Working across realism, expressionism, and abstraction, Hassan merges African motifs and geometric patterns to capture the essence of his community. His vibrant use of colour and visual storytelling draw on both traditional and contemporary African art, exploring themes of identity, social change, and personal expression. Through his work, Hassan aims to convey the value of cultural heritage, address societal issues, and inspire resilience and strength in the face of life's challenges.
John Akande: Culture, Rhythm, and Everyday Life
John Akande is a Nigerian contemporary artist based in Lagos whose vivid figurative paintings celebrate African culture in its unfiltered, everyday form. Largely self-taught and refined through studies at Yaba College of Technology, his practice fuses expressionism with realist technique, working across acrylics, mixed media, and oil on canvas.
Akande's compositions are marked by bold colour palettes, dynamic storytelling, and layered textures, often incorporating newspaper collage to create dialogue between past and present. Influenced by music and animation, his work carries a rhythmic, almost therapeutic quality, addressing themes of identity, memory, and the enduring spirit of African life. Akande has exhibited across Nigerian and international art scenes, building a growing following among collectors and curators drawn to authentic contemporary African art.
Omoyeni Arogunmati: Faces, Feeling, and Abstraction
Omoyeni Arogunmati is an award-winning Nigerian visual artist and Blkarthouse Artist Advisory Board Member whose passion for art, sparked early in life, led her to study Fine Art at the Polytechnic of Ibadan. Her practice centres on a series of identical portraits rendered in an impressionist style with shifting degrees of abstraction, exploring human emotion through the simplification of facial gesture.
Working in oil and acrylic, Omoyeni builds layered, textured surfaces using short and long brush and palette knife strokes. Her palette is deliberately restrained, often composed of bold primary colours and dark raw tones set against the contrast of the canvas's white. Drawing comparison to Carlos Delgado's Faces of the System, her paintings serve as an ongoing emotional record, translating personal experience and inspiration into expressive studies of the human face.
This July, THE.CCART is proud to celebrate this collaboration with BILARTERAL, bringing the work of Hassan Wasiu Sunday, John Akande, and Omoyeni Arogunmati to a wider audience. Through heritage, abstraction, and cultural rhythm, their paintings offer a vivid reminder of the depth and diversity within contemporary African art.
By THE.CCART
