Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola (b.1991) presents Relics 2018-2026, a special exhibition at The Watermill Center bringing together recent paintings and sculptures produced between 2018 and 2021 , many of which have rarely been exhibited publicly and some of which have not been shown for several years. Conceived specifically for Watermill, the exhibition places works from distinct moments in the artist’s career into direct conversation, creating an opportunity to consider recurring ideas, materials, and forms across a broader span of his practice. Long associated with the presentation of objects, artifacts, and experimental forms that move between categories, Watermill provides a fitting context for a project that foregrounds both
Akinbola’s durag works and a lesser-seen body of sculptural investigations.
ANTHONY OLUBUNMI AKINBOLA: Relics 2018-2026
at The Watermill Center
At the center of the exhibition is Icarus (2025), a monumental durag painting, exhibited opposite three recent works from the Brick Painting series (2026). While formally distinct from one another, these works represent two complementary directions within Akinbola’s current practice. The latter works (Brick Paintings) organize sewn and stretched durags into rigid, repeating units whose structure recalls the permanence and order of architectural construction. Icarus, by contrast, embraces movement, variability, and ascent, demonstrating a more fluid and improvisational mode of composition. Together, these works demonstrate the durag’s capacity to operate simultaneously as cultural signifier, material substance, and compositional system.
The sculptures presented here reveal an earlier but closely related line of inquiry. Produced between 2018 and 2021, they combine culturally specific objects into hybrid forms that interrupt the original function and meaning of their constituent parts. Drawing upon histories surrounding the anthropological notion of the fetish object, these works consider how value, identity, and agency become attached to material things. African power figures, devotional objects, grooming tools, and everyday commodities are brought into unexpected relationships, producing forms
that are at once familiar and estranged. Viewed alongside the recent paintings, the sculptures illuminate a longstanding concern within Akinbola’s practice: the transformation of ordinary objects into carriers of cultural memory, symbolic power, and new possibilities of meaning.
ANTHONY OLUBUNMI AKINBOLA : Relics 2018-2026
at The Watermill Center
Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola (b.1991) presents Relics 2018-2026, a special exhibition at The
Watermill Center bringing together recent paintings and sculptures produced between 2018 and
2021, many of which have rarely been exhibited publicly and some of which have not been
shown for several years. Conceived specifically for Watermill, the exhibition places works from
distinct moments in the artist’s career into direct conversation, creating an opportunity to
consider recurring ideas, materials, and forms across a broader span of his practice. Long
associated with the presentation of objects, artifacts, and experimental forms that move
between categories, Watermill provides a fitting context for a project that foregrounds both
Akinbola’s durag works and a lesser-seen body of sculptural investigations.
At the center of the exhibition is Icarus (2025), a monumental durag painting, exhibited opposite
three recent works from the Brick Painting series (2026). While formally distinct from one
another, these works represent two complementary directions within Akinbola’s current practice.
The latter works (Brick Paintings) organize sewn and stretched durags into rigid, repeating units
whose structure recalls the permanence and order of architectural construction. Icarus, by
contrast, embraces movement, variability, and ascent, demonstrating a more fluid and
improvisational mode of composition. Together, these works demonstrate the durag’s capacity to
operate simultaneously as cultural signifier, material substance, and compositional system.
The sculptures presented here reveal an earlier but closely related line of inquiry. Produced
between 2018 and 2021, they combine culturally specific objects into hybrid forms that interrupt
the original function and meaning of their constituent parts. Drawing upon histories surrounding
the anthropological notion of the fetish object, these works consider how value, identity, and
agency become attached to material things. African power figures, devotional objects, grooming
tools, and everyday commodities are brought into unexpected relationships, producing forms
that are at once familiar and estranged. Viewed alongside the recent paintings, the sculptures
illuminate a longstanding concern within Akinbola’s practice: the transformation of ordinary
objects into carriers of cultural memory, symbolic power, and new possibilities of meaning.
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