Olu Amoda
Art Twenty One
In Olu Amoda’s presumably calloused hands, aluminum spoons, steel belts and rods, nails, bronze, and wood take on a new purpose. Patiently and painstakingly, the artist bends, carves, and cuts masses of metal in repeated motions, steadily spooling them out into monumental sculptures like a spider crafting a web. The work is an epitome of endurance: a dense spread of intricate patterns, lines, shapes, forms.
The materials are often familiar. Similar steel rods, painted white, were typically used to make balcony railings in middle-class Lagos households in the 1990s. In Amoda’s work, they are bent