Yusuf Grillo valuation
Nigerian modernist of elongated figures in luminous blues, and a builder of Nigeria's art institutions.
Yusuf Grillo was born in the Brazilian Quarter of Lagos Island in 1934 and studied at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology at Zaria, taking a diploma in fine art and a postgraduate diploma in education in 1961; he was a member of the Zaria Art Society.
What a work by Yusuf Grillo is worth
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Bio
Yusuf Grillo was born in the Brazilian Quarter of Lagos Island in 1934 and studied at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology at Zaria, taking a diploma in fine art and a postgraduate diploma in education in 1961; he was a member of the Zaria Art Society. From 1962 he taught at the Yaba Technical Institute, later Yaba College of Technology, where he directed the School of Art until 1985. His paintings and murals combine European academic training with the elongated forms of Yoruba sculpture, and are known for their glowing blues, close to the indigo of adire resist-dyed cloth. He was the founding president of the Society of Nigerian Artists and chaired the visual arts committee of FESTAC in 1977. After retiring in 1987 he worked full time in his studio at Ikeja, and he died in 2021.
His paintings are relatively few and most of his work is held in Nigeria; paintings and drawings appear at auction, and provenance and exhibition history matter.
Lagos, Zaria and Yaba
His painting Drummers' Return is in the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art at Pan-Atlantic University in Lagos.
He chaired the Lagos State Council for Arts and Culture and was a vice president of the International Association of Art. He died in 2021 of complications from COVID-19.
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