Most art movements get named after the fact. Critics and historians decide, years later, that something significant happened and give it a label. Oshogbo was different. The people in that room in the early 1960s knew something was happening as it happened. They just didn’t fully know what.
What came out of that small Yoruba town in Osun State became one of the most original chapters in Nigerian art history. Works from the Oshogbo school ended up at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, and galleries across Germany, Ghana, Kenya, Japan and the United States. Not bad for a movement that started in someone’s living room.
A Town That Wasn’t Looking to Make Art History
Oshogbo in the early 1960s was not an obvious candidate for an art revolution. It was a mid-sized Yoruba town, known more for its sacred Osun grove and its theatrical scene than for painting or printmaking. But that theatrical energy turned out to matter a lot.
The playwright Duro Ladipo had established a theatre company in the town, and a number of young men were already moving between music, dance, performance, and visual expression. When the art critic Ulli Beier and his wife Georgina Beier arrived and began organizing workshops, they found a group of people who were already thinking visually. They just hadn’t had the formal tools or the space to develop it.
Susanne Wenger, a close collaborator and Beier’s former wife, had her own deep investment in the town. She spent years restoring and expanding the Osun Sacred Grove, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, fusing spiritual Yoruba imagery with large-scale sculpture and installation. Her work ran alongside the painting workshops, and the two projects fed each other in ways that are hard to separate.
The Workshops That Changed Everything
Between roughly 1962 and 1966, Ulli and Georgina Beier ran a series of art workshops in Oshogbo. They brought in young artists and gave them access to techniques: linocut printing, large-scale oil painting, emulsion work. The instruction they gave was technical, not stylistic. Nobody was told what to paint.
The results were immediate and unusual. These weren’t artists trying to paint like Europeans. They weren’t trying to copy anything. The subject matter came from what they already knew: Yoruba deities, masks, ritual imagery, stories from childhood. The technique was whatever helped them get it out.
That combination produced something that didn’t look quite like anything else being made at the time.
Rufus Ogundele and the Artists Who Emerged
Rufus Ogundele came through the Oshogbo workshops and developed a style entirely his own. He had been part of Duro Ladipo’s theatre company as a teenager, so shifting between performance and visual art felt natural to him.
Under Georgina Beier’s guidance, he learned linocut printing and began painting on a large scale — first with emulsion paint, later in oils. His paintings are structured around strong black outlines, with geometric compartments filled with colour. The imagery draws on Yoruba spiritual life: Ogun, the god of iron and creativity, appears often. Fantasy figures sit inside carefully organised compositions. Nothing in the work feels accidental.
Ogundele went on to exhibit in Nigeria, Germany, the United States, Ghana and Kenya. He served as artist-in-residence at the Iwalewa-Haus in Bayreuth in 1983, and co-founded Ogun Timehin Studios in Ife. You can see more of his work in the gallery.
Other artists who came out of the workshops include Jacob Afolabi, Twins Seven Seven, Asiru Olatunde, and Yinka Adeyemi. Each went in a different visual direction, but the grounding in Yoruba imagery stayed.
What Made Oshogbo Art Different
A lot of African modernist art in the 1960s was caught between two pressures. Western art institutions were pulling in one direction; nationalist politics in another. Oshogbo mostly ignored both.
The work wasn’t made to satisfy European collectors or prove that African artists could compete on Western terms. It also wasn’t propaganda. It was artists painting what they cared about, with the tools available to them, in a town where people took culture seriously.
That independence shows in the work. The Oshogbo painters didn’t produce sanitised, universally palatable imagery. They painted Yoruba gods, ritual scenes, personal visions. Critics sometimes compared the strong black outlines in Ogundele’s work to the German expressionists Nolde and Kirchner. Technically, there’s something to that. But the comparison misses what those outlines are actually doing. They came from a different tradition and carry different meaning.
Where the Movement Stands Today
The original generation of Oshogbo artists are mostly gone. Rufus Ogundele died in 1996. But the works are still circulating. Pieces appear at auction through Arthouse Contemporary, Bonhams, and other houses. Younger artists working in southwestern Nigeria still reference the movement, sometimes explicitly, sometimes just in the way they handle Yoruba imagery.
The global market for Nigerian art has also shifted. Collectors in Europe and North America who once overlooked African modernism have been paying closer attention. That attention has pushed prices up, but it has also brought more serious scholarship, more institutional interest, and more documentation of work that was in danger of being forgotten.
For anyone trying to understand Nigerian contemporary art, Oshogbo is unavoidable. Not because it was the only thing happening, but because what those artists figured out in that town in the early 1960s kept showing up in the work that came after.
If you want to read more about Rufus Ogundele specifically, his full biography covers his life and practice. His paintings are in the gallery. For enquiries about his work, the contact page is the place to start.
Sources & Further Reading
- Artnet: Rufus Ogundele Biography
- Artsy: Rufus Ogundele
- Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism: The Oshogbo Group
- Barrel118: The Osogbo School of Art
- Smithsonian Institution: Oshogbo workshop exhibition records