Yusuf Adebayo Cameron Grillo

(Nigerian, 1934-2021)

The Dancing Bride, circa mid-1960s

Footnotes

Provenance
A private collection, UK.

With a career extending over six decades, Yusuf Grillo (1935-2021) is one of the most significant figures in Nigerian art. As a young man, he belonged to the influential Zaria Art Group formed by pioneering artists including Uche Okeke, Bruce Onobrakpeya, and Demas Nwoko while studying together at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, Zaria in the 1950s. These artists challenged the hegemony of the European canon in the landscape of contemporary African art. They embraced their West-African cultural heritage to establish a modern Nigerian aesthetic at a time when the country was fighting for its independence from British colonial rule. Elements of Western art history were fused with themes, techniques, and mediums indigenous to Nigeria in a process that Okeke termed 'Natural Synthesis'.

While Grillo proactively engaged with the ideas propagated by the Zaria Art Group, he distinguished his approach to artmaking by privileging the role of the individual artist in this process of synthesisation. Working across diverse media including painting, sculpture, mosaic, and stained glass, he asserted that this fusion of European and Nigerian references ought to be seen 'in the light' of individual experience 'knowing that you are part of the system' (Grillo quoted in Sike and Oyelola, 1988: p. 64). Grillo's conviction in the significance of the artist's creative vision led to his own formulation of a distinctive painterly style and subject matter, as evidenced in The Dancing Bride.

Thematically, Grillo painted the people he encountered in Lagos. He favoured female subjects and had a particular interest in the Yoruba heritage which he believed to be at the heart of the city in which he was born and lived most of his life. In the present work, he captures a moment of celebration. A sense of movement is conveyed through the energetic brushstrokes used to depict the dynamic stance of the female figure: her weight rests on one leg while her hips are cocked to the side as if anticipating the next step of the dance. Executed in the cool blue and purple tones synonymous with Grillo's paintings, The Dancing Bride evidences the influence of both Pablo Picasso's Blue Period (which the artist had encountered as a student in Zaria) and abide (the indigo-dyed cloth of the Yoruba people).

While Grillo primarily takes the human figure as his subject, Chika Okeke-Agulu argues that this 'subject matter is meaningful only to the extent that it permits him to engage enduringly and passionately with form, colour and painting' (C. Okeke-Agulu, 2020: p. 41). The female figure is elongated in a process of stylization. Reflecting Grillo's enduring interest in mathematics, her body is expressed through flattened planes that echo the geometric shapes that comprise the non-representational background. The drapery of the bride's dress is transformed into curved forms which are carefully balanced against the jagged triangles that frame the figure.

As in his other paintings from the mid-1960s depicting stylised women such as Two Women (1965) and Ayi and Tayi (1965), Grillo's engagement with the female form can be conceived as much a formalist experiment as a representational exercise. Fusing mathematics, Western art historical references, and Yoruba culture, through The Dancing Bride Grillo synthesises a distinctive approach to painting which stands as a powerful contribution to postcolonial modernism within the canon of Nigerian art.

Bibliography
Paul Chike Dike and Pat Oyelola (eds.), The Zaria Art Society: A New Consciousness (Lagos, 1998)

Chika Okeke-Agulu, Yufus Grillo: Painting. Lagos. Life (Milan, 2020).