Kofo Abayomi is back, calculating, critical

Folabi Kofo- Abayomi showed up at Artyrama’s first offline exhibition in Ikoyi several weeks ago.

A scion of old Lagos money, he had been out of the scene for a while, a reason why he was the one key Lagos art collector whose perspective is missing in Contemporary Nigerian Art in Lagos Private Collections: New Trees in an Old Forest, a coffee table book edited by Jess Castellote, funded by Sammy Olagbaju and published by Bookcraft in 2012.

“There is a lot of promise here”, he said of the show, which featured mostly artists under the age of 35 and who, in the words of Castellote, the show’s organiser, “are out of the sights of collectors and main galleries”.

In a conversation that focused largely on prices (“I wish I had collected more El Anatsuis in the past”…”I sold one of my Enwonwus at a recent auction”), it was clear that Kofo -Abayomi’s approach to evaluating a work of art has remained constant in the 25+ years this writer had known him. It’s primarily about materiality. “How can this pencil drawing sell for 150,000Naira? “, he said at a point.

And, at another, he wondered: ”the challenge of putting this (installation) work at home is the decaying process of the material”.