Artistic visions

Artist Uzo Egonu’s bold and striking works were inspired by everything from pop art to his native Nigeria

BY LUKE G WILLIAMS

Nigerian-born but based in England for the majority of his life, Uzo Egonu – who studied at Camberwell College of Arts –merged African and European artistic traditions and influences into a body of work that was as visually arresting as it was eclectic and thought-provoking.

On Egonu’s death in 1996, his fellow artist Rasheed Araeen declared: “It would be a mistake to see him only as an African artist… Egonu was an artist who challenged the impoverished western myth of the naive African artist because the complexity of his work is firmly located within the tradition of modernism.”

Born on 25 December 1931 in Onitsha, a port on the banks of the River Niger, Egonu developed a love for painting and drawing while a schoolboy at Sacred Heart College in Calabar. An early success saw him win a national junior art competition aged 13 and – not long after – Egonu’s father, Henry Chukwuma Egonu, a civil servant in the British colonial administration, sought to encourage his son’s precocious talent by arranging for him to move to England and complete his schooling in Norfolk.

Egonu would return to his homeland on just one occasion before his death – an abbreviated two-day stay in the 1970s – and a sense of separation and nostalgia for the Nigeria he left behind at such a young age would become one of the abiding themes of his work, which would remain deeply influenced by his Nigerian and Igbo heritage for the entirety of his life and career.

Egonu studied fine art, design and typography at Camberwell College of Arts from 1949 until 1952. After graduation, he based himself in a studio in West Hampstead and became a working artist, building his skills and reputation slowly but surely over the next decade, turning his hand to book cover design and illustration, as well as working in oils and experimenting with printmaking and textiles.

At times, Egonu eked out a living via somewhat unconventional artistic means, such as in 1961 when he was commissioned by a British brewery to produce a piece of art for its annual calendar and contributed a wondrous painting of a Lagos marketplace.

From the mid-1960s onwards, Egonu’s profile rose, largely thanks to a variety of striking and acclaimed series of works in which he painted notable London landmarks, beginning with St Paul’s Cathedral in 1965, and followed by renderings of Westminster Abbey and Piccadilly Circus in 1966, Trafalgar Square in 1968 and Tower Bridge in 1969. The bold colours of these works, which blended tropes from schools as varied as abstract art, caricature, photorealism, pop art and cubism, as well as Nigerian-influenced ornamentation and flourishes, signalled the arrival of a unique and singular talent.

Egonu was particularly distressed by the horrors of the 1967-70 Biafran War in his homeland, a conflict which directly affected many members of his family. His artistic response to the conflict was unashamedly political and typically heartfelt – in 1968, he mounted an exhibition of his work influenced by the conflict at the Upper Grosvenor Galleries in central London.

One of the exhibits – titled Blind Eye to Tragedy – formed a coruscating attack on the limp response of western governments to the Biafran crisis, picturing as it did a mother skeleton carrying a baby skeleton on her back trapped in a visual representation that was half-eye, half-cage. The work made a splash in the national press and featured in the Daily Mirror, bringing the 37-yearold Egonu to wider attention.

Displaying an insatiable hunger for artistic improvement, Egonu attended the Working Men’s College in Camden in 1970 in order to update and refine his printmaking techniques. Thereafter printmaking, rather than painting, would become his preferred medium. Inspired by the Working Men’s College’s emphasis on exploring social issues, Egonu produced a series of hard-hitting lithographs titled Addictions, which examined issues affecting Londoners such as smoking, gambling and drug abuse.

The 1970s saw Egonu win widespread acclaim and a string of international awards and prizes – including Les Arts en Europe in Brussels in 1971, the cup of the city of Naples in 1972 and the Unesco prize in Paris in 1976. Sponsorship from multinationals such as Whitbread and Unilever also played a vital role in enabling him to continue to pursue his artistic career.

Egonu was also a founder member of the Rainbow Art Group, a collection of London-based artists from ethnic minority backgrounds, which was formed in 1978 in response to the difficulties that many such artists had in getting their work recognised through what the group referred to as the “established channels”.

In 1977, Egonu was selected as one of the artists whose work represented the UK at Festac 77 (otherwise known as the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture) in Lagos in his native Nigeria, while in 1983 the International Association of Art appointed him as a lifelong adviser – a prestigious honour that had also been afforded to Henry Moore and Pablo Picasso among others.

By the 1980s, Egonu’s work could be found in more than a dozen national galleries worldwide, as well as in permanent collections in the V&A and at Bradford’s civic art gallery Cartwright Hall. In 1986 he exhibited at the Royal Festival Hall and his work featured in major retrospectives devoted to black artists, including the 1989 Hayward Gallery exhibit titled The Other Story and the 1996 exhibition Transforming the Crown in New York.

By then, however, Egonu’s health was sadly fading. His eyesight had begun to fail, probably due to repeated exposure to chemicals used in the etching process he so loved, and he also suffered from two heart attacks.

Egonu died suddenly on 14 August 1996 aged just 64 after another heart attack. His passing – cruelly – was just a few days before he had been due to celebrate his 25th wedding anniversary to his beloved wife Hildred.

On his death, Egonu’s work and influence was widely praised. Nevertheless, for all his achievements,

ILLUSTRATION BY JESSICA KENDREW there remained a lingering sense that he had always been regarded within the traditional and white-dominated art establishment as something of an outsider, his name never receiving the high profile with the wider public that his talents warranted and deserved.

In Olu Oguibe’s definitive work on Egonu’s career – the 1995 book Uzo Egonu: an African artist in the West – the writer declared: “Egonu remained a solitary, isolated figure, partly from personal inclination, partly from the invisibility imposed by an intransigent British art establishment.”

Above all else, however, it was Egonu’s humanity that remained perhaps his most abiding characteristic and most remarked upon quality. Susan Okokon, who acted as his agent for 25 years and was also a close friend, observed movingly of Egonu soon after his death: “He was like a saint – so lovely, compassionate and peaceful. Although a quiet man he would give to other people all the time, and he nurtured a lot of young artists, so his memory will live on.”

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