Toyin Ojih Odutola valuation
Draws richly layered portraits in pen, pastel and charcoal that build fictional worlds, from Nigerian aristocracy to ancient parable.
Toyin Ojih Odutola was born in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, in 1985 and moved to the United States with her family in 1990, growing up in Berkeley and, from 1994, Huntsville, Alabama.
What a work by Toyin Ojih Odutola is worth
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Bio
Toyin Ojih Odutola was born in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, in 1985 and moved to the United States with her family in 1990, growing up in Berkeley and, from 1994, Huntsville, Alabama. She took a degree in studio art and communications at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2008 and an MFA at California College of the Arts in 2012. Her early drawings built up the skin of Black figures in layers of ballpoint pen, treating skin as a kind of geography, and her later work in pastel, charcoal and pencil tells invented stories in series. To Wander Determined, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2017 and 2018, presented the private collection of two fictional aristocratic Nigerian families. Her first UK museum solo exhibition, A Countervailing Theory, opened at the Barbican's Curve in 2020.
Her works on paper are made slowly and placed by her gallery, so few come up for sale; for those that do, provenance through her gallery and exhibition history are the first questions.
Ile-Ife, Huntsville and the Whitney
A Countervailing Theory, forty drawings telling an ancient parable set on the Jos Plateau in central Nigeria, was commissioned for the Barbican.
Her first solo exhibition, (MAPS), was in New York in 2011, while she was still a student, and she was elected to the National Academy of Design in 2019.
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