This intimate depiction of a fur-clad young woman, sitting casually in an emerald green chair against a backdrop of bright yellow, poppy-strewn wallpaper, is the lazy Sunday we all dream of. It formed part of the Nigerian-American artist Toyin Ojih Odutola’s 2016 exhibition, A Matter of Fact, at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, where all of the intricately technical portraits on display claimed to offer a glimpse into the life of an aristocratic Nigerian family—who were in fact fictional, dreamed up by the artist as a means of exploring the physical signifiers of wealth. This month marks the first-ever UK exhibition by Ojih Odutola, showcasing a beautifully realised series of new work centred on “an imagined ancient myth”, and opening at the Barbican on 26 March.
