Godwin Mayaki
I am interested in the things buildings remember after the people leave. My grandmother's compound in Bida had a wall the colour of dried hibiscus, and I have been trying, for ten years, to mix that exact red. I never will, and that is the point. The work is not about recovery — it is about the texture of what cannot be recovered. I sew because my mother sewed. I draw straight lines because my father drew straight lines. The paintings are conversations between those two hands, held inside my own.
السيرة الذاتية
Godwin Mayaki (b. 1987, Bida, Niger State) is a Nigerian contemporary artist working across painting, textile assemblage, and small-scale sculpture. Trained initially as an architect before turning to studio practice in 2013, Mayaki builds layered surfaces that combine hand-dyed indigo cloth, salvaged plywood, acrylic, and graphite. His compositions often begin as architectural drawings of imagined or remembered buildings — childhood compounds in Bida, market stalls in Minna, the unfinished housing estates ringing Abuja — which he then partially obscures with stitched fabric panels and gestural paint.His practice is rooted in what he calls "soft archaeology": the slow excavation of personal and communal memory through material accumulation rather than representation. Recurring motifs include doorways without thresholds, ladders that lead nowhere, and the geometric patterning of Nupe bida glass beadwork, which he treats as both ancestral inheritance and visual grammar.Mayaki has exhibited across Lagos, Abuja, Accra, Cape Town, and London, with growing institutional interest in Europe following his 2023 inclusion in a survey of West African abstraction at Tate Modern's Project Space. He lives and works in the Garki district of Abuja, where he runs a modest studio that doubles as an informal mentorship space for emerging artists from the Middle Belt.
معارض مختارة
- Solo exhibitions
- 2025 Soft Archaeology, Retro Africa, Abuja
- 2023 Doorways Without Thresholds, SMO Contemporary, Lagos
- 2021 Bida, in Pieces, Thought Pyramid Art Centre, Abuja
- 2018 First House, Nike Art Gallery (Project Room), Lagos
- Group exhibitions
- 2024 West African Abstraction Now, Tate Modern Project Space, London
- 2024 ART X Lagos, with Retro Africa
- 2023 Material Memory, Zeitz MOCAA Atrium Project, Cape Town
- 2022 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, Marrakech (with Retro Africa)
- 2022 The Middle Belt Speaks, National Gallery of Art, Abuja
- 2020 Quiet Geometries, Gallery 1957, Accra
- 2019 Young Nigerian Painters, Rele Gallery, Lagos
- 2017 Emerging Voices, Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos
- Residencies
- 2024 Delfina Foundation, London (3-month residency)
- 2022 Black Rock Senegal, Dakar (1-month residency)
الصحافة
- The Guardian Nigeria — "Godwin Mayaki and the Architecture of Memory" (March 2025)
- Frieze — Review of West African Abstraction Now, brief mention (October 2024)
- Contemporary And (C&) — "Five Nigerian Artists to Watch" (June 2024)
- BusinessDay Arts — Studio visit feature (February 2024)
- Apollo Magazine — "After Tate: A New Generation from Abuja" (December 2023)
- Stylus Magazine SA — Profile coinciding with Zeitz MOCAA show (August 2023)
- Art Africa — Cover feature, Issue 23 (2022)
- Omenka — Interview (2021)
التعليم
- 2015 MFA, Painting and Mixed Media, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria
- 2010 B.Sc. Architecture, University of Jos
- 2009 Foundation course, Pan-African Circle of Artists workshop, Enugu