1-54 celebrates 14 years of African art in the heart of the UK

Main image: Yeanzi, Untitled, 2026, Acrylic and melted plastic on canvas, 195 x 145 cm. Courtesy of the Artist. 

The 14th edition of the 1-54 art fair in London is set to put contemporary creations in the historical perspective of the century of African art that preceded them. 

As soon as you enter the 1-54 contemporary African art fair in London at Somerset House, you can see the connoisseurs are in their element. 

“This is the greatest fair of all, simply”, one art collector says, even while visiting the world-renowned Frieze Masters in Regent’s Park the same week.

The 1-54 fair is in its 14th iteration in London, and also exhibits each year in New York City and in Marrakech. It has succeeded in creating an unprecedented network of African and Western galleries interested in African artists, and in offering a platform like no other for them.

Some artists and gallery owners have travelled from far to be present in person at the London event. Galleries and artworks from Morocco and Egypt to South Africa, Nigeria to Kenya, Algeria to Angola, and the Congo are represented. 

A hundred years of African art

This year’s edition is special as it featured curated displays about African modernism and recent African art history, from the 1920s to the 1970s. It also set to put current creations in the historical perspective of the century of African art that preceded them. 

These included artworks from Nigeria’s Uzo Egonu, Ibrahim El-Salahi from Sudan, South African artist and musician Gerard Sekoto, Tanzanian visual artist Sam Joseph Ntiro, and the prodigy Algerian woman painter Baya Mahieddine. Also featured were works by Bertina Lopes, Skunder Boghossian, Kofi Antubam, and Papa Ibra Tall.

For Touria El Glaoui, the founding director of the fair, it has always been important to widen that historical perspective, but it was previously practically challenging. 

“We always, in a way, had modern artists at the fair, but in a small quantity, with one gallery doing it,” she says.

To have more, they have to get over the fact that most artists’ estates were, for a long time, not well structured.  

This year, those obstacles were overcome thanks to Dr Nancy Dantas, a brilliant art historian and researcher from South Africa currently based in Portugal, who curated the ‘West Wind’ special project for 1-54 this year. 

The project offers insight into African modernism, drawn from months of reflections, research and exchanges. Dantas also organised a talk about ‘African Modernists and The Winds of Change’.

“The exhibition West Wind is not a definition of African modernism; it’s a take on it,” Nancy Dantas says. “It offers people an introduction to the practice of many modernist artists that were working in the 1960s or 1970s.”

This period was a coming of age for many artists, she insists. 

“And it was also a time when artists and thinkers were very much responding to and thinking of ways to dismantle the effects of colonialism. So, in many of the works that you see here, there is this shared concern, this recuperation of the classical or traditional practices,” she added.

 “Another philosophy present in the exhibition through, for instance, Gerard Sekoto is that of “the new African”, this idea of the African being on equal footing with the European.”

In that sense, West Wind contributes to the visitors’ understanding of contemporary African art in perspective with its predecessors. 

The next generation

Another research-led cultural project, ‘(Re)Casting the Canon’, is designed to “support and amplify the next generation of critical arts and culture writers,” according to curator Folasade Ologundudu. 

Originally from Lagos and now based in New York, Ologundudu sought to bring out “the hidden histories and nuances of African and African diasporic peoples to the centre of artistic stewardship and cultural discourse.” 

The project explored “how contemporary African art history is shaped through collective memory, reflection, and writing.” 

It invited participants to question inherited art-historical narratives while developing new ways of looking at, interpreting, and writing about African art.

“It is a participatory installation that thinks about the premise of each of us as individuals being able to write the stories of artistic history,” Ologundudu told me at the fair. 

She worked for about half a decade and had extensive conversations with black and African artists about their work being contextualised in a “very narrow view from a Western perspective and from the white gaze.”

The room included work from Samson Bakare, Layo Bright, Bunmi Agusto, Oluseye, and Modupeola Fadugba, with the piece OBATALA (2026) from the Femi Akinsanya African Art Collection. 

“I was looking for diversity in terms of material, and for artists who have developed a very particular visual language in which there’s a sense of conviction, a strong approach to their artistic practice. So their visual language is very self-possessed,” Ologundudu says. 

With the installation, the audience was invited to reflect on their ideas around history and writing the history of contemporary art today. 

Women… and emerging artists from all corners of Africa

If household names like the London-based Moroccan-born photographer Hassan Hajjaj, presenting his new series My London Rockstars, are also a highlight at 1-54, El Glaoui says this edition is also showcasing the emergence of brilliant young women artists.

Bianca Batlle Nguema is from Barcelona, Spain. Bianca felt compelled to reconnect with her maternal culture when her mother, who was from Equatorial Guinea, passed away.

She did so by painting portraits of female nudes, often posing herself, as a way to represent freedom, happiness and a connection to nature.

The woman-led gallery Borderlands Art, which engages artists and themes of environmental and social impact, presented Our Canvas Grows From The Soil. 

Linking practices from Uganda and Ghana, the works are made from barkcloth (lubugo, kyenkyen), listed by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.

The Misr gallery, from Zamalek, in Cairo, presented artworks from Egyptian painter Gamal Elkheshen, a multidisciplinary visual artist, academic, and associate professor born in Cairo in 1988. It is inspired by his relationship with the land, the soil, the Nile and their origins, as well as works by Souad Abdul Rasul and Hend Adnan. 

“I’m basically concerned about women in our societies,” Adnan told me. “So I painted the same women many times over the years, then noticed something, and it was the beginning of this series: when I painted them not married, still young, they had fire in their eyes, life, a future, everything…. A few years later, the fire had disappeared.” 

So the artist used striking colours, like red and yellow, and close-ups, to focus on the life-force that remains in these women despite the fact that they give all their energy away to others, family members and society.

Nigeria’s powerful presence 

Mobolaji Ogunrosoye, a Lagos-based visual artist born in 1991, works at the intersection of photography and collage. Her work explores “the distortion and nuances of contrasting emotions found within representations of Nigerian and black women.”

In her Portraits series, Ogunrosoye created multi-layered collages, incorporating a process of burning and cutting “to create depth in revealing underlying layers of images,” she said.

Ugonna Ibe, the curator at Yenwa Gallery in Lagos, came to present paintings by three Nigerian artists, Juwon Aderemi (b. 2000), Damilola Opedun (1983), and Paolo Sisiano (1988, based in Rome, between London & Lagos), for its debut at 1-54 London. She founded the gallery in 2021 and got a permanent space in 2023.

“These works really were about our human experience individually, the interior, the exterior and the self as well. So that’s why you have the community in a slum and the architecture of that area against the backdrop of Venice and other works,” Ibe explained. 

She feels lucky to have a robust collector base in Nigeria, but says artists also want to be seen internationally. “So, there is that pride, and we’re grateful for platforms like 1-54. I have done a couple American fairs, which were, you know, not necessarily Africa-focused.”

That’s why London remains the “Grand Lady” of the 1-54 franchise, Touria El Glaoui told me, compared to Marrakech and New York. 

“London being such an international city, we have the chance to give this visibility at large,” she added. “We do have it as well in Marrakech, but not in terms of the European institutions, as they are coming to London, and those international collectors hopping away or being here for Frieze, then coming to 1-54.”

It’s the most respected one out of all the three 1-54 fairs, she admits.

“We’ve been here for 14 years, so there’s history that is being created here. And then in Marrakech we are bringing contemporary African art to Africa, which is honestly the most important thing we could do, you know?” she concludes.