LOVE IN UNITY , 2023 Acrylic on Canvas 60 x 48 in View Artwork Details There is a Yoruba proverb that Oluwafemi Afolabi carries the way other painters carry a reference image. Tí ọwọ́ kan àdán bá kù, á fi ró igi. If a bat has only one hand left, it will still hold onto the tree. He heard it first from his mother, during a period when the family had relocated from Birnin Gwari in Kaduna State back to Oyo Town, and his father's sawmill had burned to the ground. The bat, in that context, was not a metaphor anyone had to explain. It was also, for a time, what the family ate — his mother would buy bats from the Hausa community nearby, one of the few available sources of meat. The animal entered his life as sustenance before it became symbol. That layering is what makes Afolabi's work harder to dismiss than it might first appear.He is based in Ibadan and has been building a practice in acrylic and oil across more than a decade of professional work. His recent paintings — Becoming Light, Unbroken Spirit, The Silent Glow, all from 2024 and 2025 — place women in Ankara fabric against backgrounds that carry the texture of decorative wall painting. The figures are frontal, composed, often looking slightly away. The Ankara is rendered with attention to its geometry, the way the pattern holds its own against the figure rather than simply dressing her. In several works, a bat appears: perched, implied, or worked into the composition's edge.Afolabi graduated from Emmanuel Alayande College of Education in Oyo State in 2017 and has recently completed a degree in Fine and Applied Arts at Obafemi Awolowo University. His exhibition record runs from the Life in My City Festival circuit in Nigeria through to the Hampstead Art Fair in London in 2024 and the Affordable Art Fair at Battersea Park in 2026. He appeared on Artsy in 2022 through two group shows, Forgotten Identity and Fashion, An Instant Language. The range is real, even if the institutional weight is still accumulating.When we spoke, he was direct about the origins of his iconography in a way that felt earned rather than rehearsed. He described how his mother, after his father's death in 1999, took on domestic work for a church member — processing cassava into garri and fufu, managing the household — and how he would accompany her. The bat proverb came from that period. As a young boy, overwhelmed by the uncertainty of what had happened to the family, he asked her how they were going to survive. She answered with the proverb about the bat and the tree. Years later, when he asked her why she always wore Ankara rather than more expensive fabric, her answer was practical: it was light, it was affordable, and the money she saved went to her children. "I decoded it," he said, describing the moment. What he had read as ordinary habit became, in retrospect, a form of deliberate economy.That decoding is central to how he talks about his work. He does not present himself as someone who arrived at his subject matter through formal research or conceptual program. The symbols accumulated through lived proximity, and he recognised them later. The Ankara in his paintings is his mother's fabric. The bat is her proverb. The women he depicts carry the weight of women he has watched manage scarcity with something that does not look like scarcity from the outside.Becoming Light (2025, acrylic on canvas) is the clearest example of how those layers work in a single painting. The background carries patterned decorative motifs — the kind Afolabi used to paint on the walls of clients' houses before he made the transition to studio work. He put them in deliberately. When I asked about the piece, he described sitting quietly in his studio, reconnecting with where he had come from and measuring the distance between that point and the present. The wall-painting patterns are a record of that distance: one kind of labour becoming the ground for another. The figure in the foreground is rendered in Ankara, the fabric's geometry pressing forward against the decorative field behind her. A sense of emergence runs through the composition — not stated, but structural. He described the feeling of seeing progress arrive gradually, step by step, and of sensing a brighter point almost within reach while still asking what needed to be added or removed to get there. It is a practical description of how a painting gets resolved. It is also a description of something larger.His process started with graphite and charcoal — cheap, available — before he moved into acrylic. He learned to mix his own acrylic paints from raw materials, partly because commercial paints were expensive, partly because he already had the knowledge from earlier work painting houses and doing decorative wall designs. The quick-drying nature of acrylic remains a problem he has not fully resolved. He described the difficulty of rendering fabric with the medium — the way it locks you into decisions before you are ready, the inability to return to a wet surface hours later and continue building depth. Oil paint, he said, would give him more room to work the fabric realistically, to get the weight and texture right. He has not made the switch yet, partly a matter of access and cost, but it is clearly where his attention is going. The Ankara patterns in his current work are already technically demanding; the ambition is to push further into the material truth of the cloth.He named the painter Kehinde Wiley as a reference point — someone whose work he returns to when thinking about scale and aspiration. What he takes from Wiley is not a stylistic template but a proof of possibility: that figurative painting centred on Black subjects, executed with formal seriousness and surface richness, can operate at the highest level of the international market. Afolabi's current figures are women in fabric that means something specific to him. The formal challenge he is setting himself is to make that meaning legible through paint quality, not through explanation.The 2025 group exhibition at the National Museum in Ibadan, Aìmàsìkò — the title translates roughly as "ignorance of divine timing" — placed his work alongside other artists working across West Africa. Afolabi said the title resonated with something he had been thinking about in his own practice: the way progress in a painting, and in a life, becomes visible only when you step back and measure the gap between where you were and where you are now. The show was one of the more significant contexts his work had appeared in domestically, and the National Museum setting gave it a different register than the festival circuit where he had built much of his Nigerian visibility.That festival circuit has been important. The Life in My City Festival, which runs editions in Ibadan and Enugu, named him among the top one hundred artists at its Ibadan edition in 2022 — an early marker of recognition that helped establish his profile within Nigeria before the London appearances followed. The Hampstead Art Fair in 2024 and the Affordable Art Fair at Battersea Park in 2026 represent a different kind of reach, and his work on Artsy through the 2022 group shows gave him some international exposure, though he is still building the collector relationships that sustain a practice at scale. He works out of Ibadan, which puts him at some distance from Lagos, the gravitational centre of the Nigerian art market. That distance is a practical fact he is navigating rather than a position he has theorised.What comes through in the work, and in conversation, is a painter who knows exactly what his symbols mean and is still working out how to make the paintings equal to that knowledge. The bat and the Ankara are not choices borrowed from a broader cultural vocabulary; they are specific to one woman's decisions during a specific period of difficulty. The paintings are attempts to make that specificity hold on canvas — to give it the kind of permanence that memory does not guarantee."I have made up my mind," he said, "that every artwork I create will honor her commitment, resilience, and unconditional love. The bat represents survival. The Ankara represents sacrifice. Together, they tell my mother's story — and mine." Discover more of Oluwafemi Afolabi's work and available pieces on their Studio profile. View Oluwafemi Afolabi's Profile