Tribes Art Africa Gallery (TAAG) was founded in 2001 by Rodney Asikhia and is now recognized as the Rodney Asikhia Gallery. The gallery is driven by a passion for beauty and quality in art. This quality is reflected in the works selected and in their handling and presentation. As its name indicates, one of its driving philosophies and missions is the promotion of art from Africa and the African diaspora. To this end, it has represented well over a hundred African artists in the 20 years since its founding. Rodney Asikhia, the gallery founder, believes that African artists and all other artists of color have important stories to tell and unique viewpoints to share.
In addition to this, the work of the gallery is aimed at addressing and correcting the racial bias that leaves black artists and black art underrepresented in many art institutions around the world. It also emphasizes the importance of visual arts to communities by organizing public programs, lectures, symposia, forums, and the like. All of these also ensure that the promotion and sale of artworks are met with critical engagement and appreciation. TAAG Gallery specializes in artist management, art collections, art management, art sale, art leasing, industry reports, auctions, and art commissions.
Featured Artists
At their booth at the Artexpo Dallas 2022, TAAG will be showing the works of 6 artists: Daniel Gyekyi Gyan, Sisqo Ndombe, Madoti Oluwadamilare, Bara Sketchbook, Kelani Fatai, and Wilson Imini. Several of the works being exhibited are figurative and portrait paintings featuring black subjects. The paintings, in style, composition and theme, explore personhood, identity, urbanity, strength, human beauty, personal history and individual agency.
Daniel Gyekyi Gyan
Daniel Gyekyi Gyan is a Ghanaian artist currently living and working in Accra, Ghana. Gyan studied at Accra’s Ghanatta College of Art and Design. He graduated in 2008 and took to painting in earnest. The sources of his inspiration derive from his immediate neighbourhood, the internet, fashion, models and urban culture. His canvases bear all these influences, as he strives to bring into every piece as much of his world as he can.
Madoti Oluwadamilare
Madoti Oluwadamilare is a contemporary artist based in Lagos, Nigeria. He taught himself and mastered his art through practice and consistency. Inspired by his environment, his paintings capture the struggle of individuals who try to be upright amidst the harsh reality surrounding them. His paintings are bright-colored and show figures with flower or lightbulb heads. His clean lines, great facility with color, and carefully selected contemporary backgrounds express a range of moods: self-assured, thoughtful, calm, flummoxed, and cheerful.
Sisqo Ndombe
Sisqo Ndombe is a Congolese artist who makes figurative paintings with magical realist or surrealist elements. His work makes use of bright colors and shows subjects with ecstatic gazes. This may be read as a celebration of self and of identity. His paintings with their pairings of dual figures, with their holding of cockerels and flowers, speak to inheritance, beauty, complexity, and African spirituality.
Kelani Fatai
Kelani Fatai is a young Nigerian artist based in Lagos, Nigeria. He studied painting and design at the Yaba College of Technology, Yaba, Lagos. His works are figurative paintings with a strong focus on portraits of women dressed in fashionable clothes. Very notably, the backgrounds in his paintings are covered in flowers. The realism and strongly aesthetic quality of his paintings, done in a style reminiscent of Kehinde Wiley, give them their great appeal.
Bara Sketchbook
Bara Sketchbook is a painter whose works are done in strong and vivid neon colours. The subjects of his painting are often presented in intimate poses, and from how much character he infuses through the use of colours and intense gazes, one can surmise that they have strong, complex personalities. He, very pointedly, is a painter of illustrious figures.
Wilson Imini
Wilson Imini is a young painter based in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city. His interests and œuvre are focused on figurative paintings of famous figures in which he blends life portraiture with imagination. The paintings are done in bright—or more appropriately, bold colours. There are large swathes of sky and grass and intense young faces tinged red. The figures in the paintings are self-assured and powerful, occupying a central world in which all forces and influences seem to belong to and revolve around them.
Rodney Asikhia will be exhibiting at Booth 114 at Artexpo Dallas from September 16 – 18, 2022.
