Adedotun Fashina's Urban Relative situates itself within a distinguished lineage of Nigerian urban painting that reaches back through the self-taught masters of the Lagos scene and draws on the visual energy of the city as its primary subject. Fashina, trained in Business Administration at Yaba College of Technology, came to painting through sustained observation of the dense human environments of Lagos, and his aerial compositional perspective gives this 90 x 90 cm oil painting a bird's-eye authority that is both documentary and lyrical. The figures in Urban Relative are rendered as a social organism, compressed into the shared space of transport and commerce, their individuality preserved through Fashina's careful use of colour and gestural brushwork. Created in 2014, the work reflects Lagos at a particular moment of urban expansion and social complexity, making it a historically grounded document as well as a formal achievement. The acrylic-realist style recalls aspects of the Oshogbo painting tradition while remaining entirely contemporary in its concerns. Source: Alexis Galleries