Echoes of identity by Oluwafemi Akanmu
Explore Mondoir Studio
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 48 x 48 in
Year: 2025
Price: $3500.00 USD
Status: available
This piece captures a glimpse of cultural memory. Transforming into a visual poem, the artwork explores both individual and collective identities, with each mark adding to an unspoken storytelling of existence. It encourages viewers to interpret, contemplate, and discover pieces of themselves within the intricate patterns of another’s expression.
Why collect this work?
A sharply bounded profile contains a dense field of marks that also recur across its ground, presenting identity as both a recognizable outline and a pattern continuous with its surroundings.
- Akanmu states that his practice addresses Black identity, African cultural memory, and communal life. Here, those aims are carried by the relationship between a singular head and a repeated visual language rather than by narrative detail.
- In the photograph, the right-facing profile is immediately legible, while its facial features emerge from clustered white lines, dots, and dark passages. A circular form near the temple provides a visual anchor amid the compressed pattern.
- The documented acrylic-on-canvas medium supports broad, opaque contrasts and repeated rounded shapes. Irregular grey-brown areas interrupt the cleaner black-and-white scheme, complicating any reading of the figure as a fixed emblem.
- This painting is particularly useful for considering how portraiture can signify a person without descriptive likeness. Its shared motifs across figure and ground make the title’s “echoes” structurally visible.
About the Artist
Oluwafemi Akanmu
Oluwafemi Akanmu is an artist on Mondoir Studio. Artistic discipline: painting. Based in Ibadan, NG.
Nationality: Nigerian
Through my art, I intentionally highlight the richness of African culture and its enduring beauty, with particular emphasis on the dignity and...
