Mixed feelings 4 by Oluwafemi Akanmu
Explore Mondoir Studio
Medium: Charcoal and acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 18 x 24 in
Year: 2025
Price: $1200.00 USD
Status: available
Mixed Feelings” is a visual series that captures the emotional complexity of Black womanhood strength, softness, pride, visibility and invisibility. Each portrait in this series holds the gaze of its subject with quiet defiance, inviting the viewer to pause, reflect, and feel. In a world that often demands emotional clarity or neat narratives, Mixed Feelings celebrates complexity. It affirms that contradiction is not confusion but depth. That beauty, identity, and emotion can coexist in layered, unapologetic form.
Why collect this work?
A tightly cropped figure meets the viewer’s gaze while a high, patterned collar turns the lower half of the portrait into a field of graphic contrast. This division holds recognition and abstraction in productive tension.
- Akanmu states that his practice emphasizes the dignity of Black identity and the complexity of lived African experience. Here, that aim is carried by the subject’s steady bearing rather than by narrative detail.
- The face is modelled through dark tonal shifts, with bright highlights sharpening the eyes and lips. Against the blue ground, the white-on-black garment competes for attention without displacing the face.
- The documented charcoal and acrylic on canvas permit two distinct registers: subtle tonal modelling and flat, opaque pattern. Their juxtaposition makes the portrait read simultaneously as an individual likeness and a constructed image.
- Dated 2025 and measuring 18 by 24 inches according to the catalogue, Mixed feelings 4 provides a focused case for considering how contemporary portraiture can distribute identity across gaze, silhouette, clothing, and ground.
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...
