1-54 London 2024 Brings New Voices of Contemporary African Art to the Fore

Visitors to London’s Somerset House this week might arrive at the Renaissance-style complex with a question: How on Earth did a double-decker bus get through its ornate (and quite low) archways?

The bus, visitors will quickly note, isn’t the product of a wrong turn but rather a special project in the Edmond J. Safra Fountain Court by Slawn. The artist, arguably one of the most buzzy names in the London art world right now, has spray-painted parts of the vehicle in his signature tongue-in-cheek styles that highlight themes of accessibility, modernity, and cultural symbols.

It’s a fittingly monumental entrance to the 11th edition of 1-54, which has become a staple of London’s art-packed October Frieze Week. With its sprawling corridors and tricky staircases, Somerset House might not be the first venue that many would associate with an art fair. But since it started in 2013, 1-54, which is dedicated to contemporary African art and its diaspora, has made the venue a comfortable home.

“1-54 London has cemented itself,” said London dealer Ed Cross, who has participated in the fair since its second edition. “This is where the fair started, and there is no comparison with any other fair. There are plenty of other good fairs but this is really the master fair for contemporary African art.”

Bringing together more than 60 galleries from 23 countries, this year’s edition of the fair features 23 first-time exhibitors—the most since its inception. The influx of new names also places a new spotlight on Ghanaian, Moroccan, and Brazilian artists and galleries, noted founding director Touria El Glaoui. “The diversity and richness of the artworks on display reflect the dynamic and evolving nature of contemporary African art, and we are thrilled to be able to provide a platform that celebrates the talents of both established and emerging artists,” she said.

As the VIP day to the fair got underway on an overcast Thursday morning, a calm atmosphere in the venue’s courtyard belied the more crowded corridors inside, with more than a handful of confused visitors consulting their maps as they worked their way through the fair. In what has become a fixture of 1-54 London, the event was marked by a warmness from the gallerists, artists, and associated crowd: Dealers at the fair, quite refreshingly, seem to be as happy to make new connections as they are to make transactions.

Many of the 1-54 London debutants offered standout presentations and new perspectives, bringing a new freshness to the works on view across the fair.

The U.S. nomadic gallery Superposition, for instance, dedicates its booth to a solo presentation of glass works by Nigerian artist Layo Bright, who is currently having a solo museum show at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut. The delicate works, which feature a series of faces obscured by floral elements, interrogate themes of identity and Nigerian customs.

The gallery’s owner Storm Ascher was invited to 1-54’s London edition after participating in its New York fair last year and praised how the fair’s community-oriented spirit aligned with the gallery.

“They just put us on the map internationally, and it gave us that traction for other places that normally wouldn’t have even looked at us,” Ascher told Artsy. “It gives a lot of visibility to Black women–led galleries and Black artists across different ethnicities and experiences.” Within the first few hours of the fair, the gallery had sold a pair of Bright’s works.

At Pearl Lam Galleries, new works by Nigerian artist Alimi Adewale are grouped together under the title “Terra Matter.” In a series of tapestries using kilim, a woven rug material, Adewale paints with compelling expressionistic, distorted features, which he described as a reflection of “our place within the natural world and the emotional landscapes that shape our understanding of self.” Lam discovered Adewale’s work on a trip to Lagos last year and, “desiring to share his work with a global audience,” as she put it, took on global representation of the artist.

At London, Miami, and L.A.’s Cynthia Corbett Gallery, a series of ceramic works by Freya Bramble-Carter were receiving attention from the nearby crowds in the fair’s embankment section. The works, which offer inventive mutations on jugs, pots, and faces, are glazed in swirling colors that lend them an almost surreal quality. “Her work is very feminine and fluid, and about beauty and about humanity, and the ceramics are just divine,” said gallery director Cynthia Valianti Corbett, who noted an immediately “positive” response from fairgoers.

Other notable highlights from fair newcomers included a series of luscious paintings by Nicolas Lambelet Coleman at PM/AM; a varied series of works by artists from Morocco and its diaspora at House of Beau; and a group presentation of emerging Ghanaian artists at the Accra-based Artemartis.

For many of the returning galleries at Somerset House, this year’s edition of the fair offers a chance to reconnect with familiar faces and share their programs with a broader audience.

“It’s really exciting for us to step away from the Portuguese-speaking circuit because our mission is to talk about Lusophone [art],” said Carmen Bioque, a curatorial researcher at Luanda- and Lisbon-based gallery MOVART. The gallery is presenting a suite of works from artists across its program of artists from African and Portuguese-speaking countries, including a series of brightly colored and captivatingly detailed mixed textile works from Angolan artist Januario Jano that were grabbing the attention of passersby.

Much of the discoveries at 1-54 cut across emerging names as well as more established artists that a London audience might not be familiar with. Nairobi’s Circle Art Agency is presenting a comprehensive solo booth of works from the 1960s to the 2020s by the octogenarian Ugandan artist Theresa Musoke. A series of expressive paintings pull together layered markmaking that is blended into swirls, stripes, and concealed figurative elements such as flowers and landscapes. “I’ve been wracking my brains for how to spread the word more about her and I thought, ‘Why don’t we try and do a mini-retrospective,’” said the gallery’s director Danda Jarolmek. “I’m hoping that we’ll catch people who might be interested in collaborating with us on larger exhibitions of her work.”

Indeed, the audience in attendance was also cited by galleries presenting works at the more emerging end of the spectrum.

“For us it’s really important to spotlight and also pay heed to the young artists that are in the contemporary African diasporic art scene right now,” said Yasmin Patel, a managing director at DADA Gallery. “That has been consistent through the gallery’s programming.” At the presentation—its fifth at the fair—the gallery showcases paintings by the African American Iranian artist Kofi Perry. Weaving together spiritual and dystopian elements, these standout works depict characters that are “on the search for knowledge,” Perry said, in a variety of evocative scenes and situations.

Many galleries at the fair are also taking a rigorous approach to curation at their booths. At Johannesburg’s Guns & Rain, a trio of emerging artists—Tuli Mekondjo, Bev Butkow, and Princia Matungulu—are creating textile-based works while incorporating unconventional materials and challenging traditional dynamics of labor and representation.

“The drive behind the program is to have an academic slant to the practice and presentation of contemporary art in Southern Africa,” said a staffer from the gallery. “1-54 is a good intellectual environment to see face-to-face what people are doing across the globe. It’s always so easy to get that kind of feedback and see that reaction.”

A similar energy was observed by Sorella Acosta, founder of Madrid’s OOA Gallery. “There’s an energy in London and also a lot of collectors, not only from London but also from the U.S.,” Acosta told Artsy. The sumptuous “Afro-escapist” paintings in the gallery’s booth by Megan Gabrielle Harris were receiving plenty of collector interest in the run-up to the fair. “This morning, I spoke with the collector who bought a work, and he came yesterday from Cape Town,” Acosta noted.