Abe Odedina: You Give Me Fever

Diane Rosenstein Gallery is proud to announce You Give Me Fever, a solo exhibition of paintings by Abe Odedina – a Nigerian-British artist who lives and works in London and Bahia, Brazil. These paintings, mostly made in 2022, are an exploration of different aspects of desire. This is the artist’s solo debut in Los Angeles. Odedina’s vibrant compositions center on the figure, but are not portraits in the traditional sense, although they do employ many devices associated with portraiture. The artist describes them as “figurative propositions, devices to explore ideas around our shared humanity, the triumphs and tragedies of daily life.”

 

Using acrylic paint on a plywood panel, rather than canvas, the paintings in You Give Me Fever embody all the solidity and practicality of shop fronts or municipal murals. Though he is a self-described folk artist, Odedina implicitly and explicitly questions the validity of 'folk art' as a discrete category.