In Dennis Osadebe’s 2017 exhibition Remember the Future, people from different professions appeared in spacesuits. Ankara patterns and bold colour entered scenes with flattened planes and a deliberately improbable premise. The suit, one of modern culture’s most familiar images of exploration, did not lift its wearer out of a Nigerian social world. It asked who had been missing from the image of the explorer, and what would change if that absence were corrected without discarding the person’s other histories.
Osadebe is a Lagos-born artist who works across painting, sculpture and installation. He lives and works in Lagos. In a 2017 interview with OkayAfrica, he described Afrofuturism as an invitation for a next generation to think beyond received limits. He also explained his own phrase, Neo Africa, as an attempt to move past expectations placed on artists when their work is labelled African. These ideas are related, but they do different jobs. Afrofuturism expands the time and space in which Black people can be imagined. Neo Africa challenges the present-day structures that decide what an African artwork is supposed to provide.
The paintings give those positions a visible form. A masked or suited figure can be unmistakably present while withholding an easy reading of individual identity. Pattern, colour, architecture and pose become as important as a face. Osadebe has made this figure across different bodies of work, but the settings and materials change. The future in his art is not one destination. It is a recurring test of the assumptions attached to the body at the centre of the picture.
Remembering a future
The title Remember the Future folds two directions of time into one phrase. A future ordinarily has to be predicted or made; here it can also be remembered. In his OkayAfrica conversation, Osadebe said the exhibition looked ahead while insisting that the present is a place from which to begin. That qualification matters. A science-fiction image may invite an audience to ignore the current world as an obstacle. Osadebe’s suited figures carry signs of the current world with them. Their clothing and professions do not dissolve simply because the scene has acquired a spacecraft’s most recognizable garment.
The exhibition curator’s description identifies mixed-media canvases populated by men and women of different professions in spacesuits, with Ankara motifs and a flattened picture plane. Those choices resist a single heroic astronaut. Exploration becomes plural and social. A profession suggests work already being done; Ankara fabric connects the invented suit to textile practices and contemporary dress. The flatness keeps the scene close to graphic design and illustration instead of offering a seamless simulation of space. A viewer knows this is a constructed proposition and is asked to consider why it has been constructed.
There is humour in seeing a familiar uniform of scientific prestige redistributed among figures who are not presented as the usual space-program heroes. The humour has a sharp edge. A society can celebrate technological possibility while excluding many people from its imagined future. By dressing ordinary professional identities for an extraordinary journey, Osadebe exposes that exclusion without needing an explanatory caption inside the painting. The suit operates as a question addressed to a visual culture that has often treated the astronaut as a default white figure.
The patterns keep the suit from becoming a simple symbol of admission to an existing institution. If a figure enters the future wearing visual references that have travelled through African markets and wardrobes, the future itself has to change. It can no longer be pictured as a neutral realm that graciously makes space for difference. The scene becomes an argument that people bring their own materials and meanings when they cross a threshold. Osadebe’s figures are not guests in a borrowed tomorrow.
Digital groundwork, painted surface
The method of making is part of the argument. Osadebe told OkayAfrica that he develops images and layouts digitally, then overlays them with acrylic paint. This process joins the capacity to arrange and revise a composition on screen to the physical marks and colour of a painted surface. The two phases need not be assigned opposite cultural meanings. Digital design is not automatically futuristic, and acrylic is not automatically traditional. Their combination is useful because it allows the artist to control a scene’s graphic clarity while leaving evidence of a hand and a material object.
The method also changes how flatness can function. A digitally planned shape may sit cleanly beside another, while paint gives the surface a texture and a record of decisions made after the initial layout. In works where a character’s form is simplified or masked, the meeting between crisp arrangement and painterly finish keeps the image from feeling like a mere icon. It can be direct enough for a viewer to read quickly, then detailed enough to reward a longer stay.
Osadebe studied business management and later innovation and entrepreneurship before developing an international exhibition practice. Those studies should not be made to explain the artwork by themselves. They do, however, sit beside an artist’s interest in how images circulate beyond a conventional gallery. In 2017, he spoke of adapting his work to clothing and everyday objects so people could wear or handle it. That extension changes the audience’s relation to an image. A painting can ask a visitor to stop; a shirt can travel with a person through a city. The same visual vocabulary acquires a different public life.
His collaboration with the fashion label Orange Culture is another example. Osadebe described a shared interest in a fresh, futuristic aesthetic. Painting and fashion cannot be collapsed into one medium: a garment moves with a wearer and must answer to a body in ways a canvas does not. But the collaboration suggests why Osadebe’s graphic figures and vivid surfaces are readily translated across forms. His art is concerned with the image’s ability to enter contemporary life, not only with a collector’s ability to possess it.
Ten rooms of modern magic
Five years after Remember the Future, Osadebe presented Modern Magic at KÖNIG Galerie in London. The artist’s own exhibition page records ten new paintings made with acrylic and archival pigment ink on canvas. It names works including Staged, Factory Setting, Centred, Knowledge Seeker and Alchemist. The titles suggest a theatre of roles and processes rather than one continuous space narrative. A person can be placed on a stage, centered in a composition, set within a factory, or pictured as a seeker of knowledge. The change in title changes the questions brought to the figure.
The gallery’s exhibition account describes characters as performers in abstracted architectural spaces, where lighting, exaggerated shadows and heightened perspective create a dreamlike stage. Masks become signs of protection as well as concealment. This is a different use of speculative imagery from the spacesuit of 2017. The earlier suit suggested outward travel. A mask in Modern Magic may instead direct attention to the unstable relationship between a visible body and the forces around it. What is the figure allowed to show, and what helps it withstand being seen?
Knowledge Seeker and Alchemist are particularly useful titles in this context. Seeking knowledge describes a journey without specifying a destination; alchemy names a process that changes one material into another. Both concern transformation, but neither depends on a gadget invented for a future year. The art’s magic lies in the possibility that a person can enter a differently ordered space and come out with altered capacities. The paintings can be read as stages on which learning and change are given visual pressure through architecture, light and costume.
The exhibition’s material choices also connect back to Osadebe’s digital-to-acrylic method. Archival pigment ink gives a crisp image a durable place on canvas; acrylic can alter its surface and emphasise the painter’s intervention. A work titled Factory Setting might make an audience expect standardization. Instead, each of the ten canvases carries a distinct combination of figure, stage and paint. The title’s association with default programming is held against a practice built around reconfiguring defaults.
The idea of magic can be difficult when applied carelessly to African art, as though any spiritual or symbolic reference had to be mysterious to a Western viewer. Osadebe’s use is more precise. The exhibition deliberately frames visual challenges and theatrical events, and the artist’s broader project contests the demand that his work perform a predictable Africanness. In Modern Magic, a stage is a place where appearance can be controlled and unsettled. The paintings let a figure move between recognition and disguise, power and vulnerability, within a designed visual world.
Entering a national collection from another door
Osadebe’s project Please Enter was made for the National Gallery X and Royal Opera House Audience Labs commission The Rules Do Not Apply. The National Gallery’s account explains that the artist responded to existing works by Paula Rego and choreographer Kristen McNally. He clothed a ballerina in a form inspired by the Yoruba iro, bringing a Nigerian garment into a dialogue with an established European art institution and a dance figure associated with its stage traditions.
That gesture is more than a costume swap. The gallery describes an echo of the 1960s practice of wearing an iro as a miniskirt rather than only as a wrapper around the waist. Clothing becomes an archive of adaptation and self-determination. The ballerina is not simply dressed in something called traditional to add cultural colour. Her garment points to a history in which wearers themselves changed how a form could be used. Osadebe brings that history into a scene about art, performance and who is invited to enter a canon.
The title Please Enter is courteous and pointed. An invitation can signal welcome, but it also reveals who has the power to grant access. The commissioning programme sought proposals from artists underrepresented in its previous awards, responding to the conditions of the pandemic. Osadebe’s work speaks to that context without being confined to it. It asks what happens when a Nigerian artist is not positioned outside a national collection looking in, but makes an image that changes the terms of the encounter.
His use of a digital commission also sits naturally with his painted practice. The project does not treat a screen as a lesser substitute for the canvas. It uses the screen’s reach and the institution’s collection as part of the material. The figure’s clothing, borrowed dance references and art-historical setting become components of a new conversation. The title invites the audience in, while the visual decisions ask what kind of space they have entered and whose history it has made room for.
Later connections
Osadebe’s 2025 New York presentation Forcing Connections continued his interest in joining forms that art markets often separate. The artist’s current biography records the exhibition at Ceysson & Bénétière, while the gallery’s NADA presentation previewed works including Archive is a Mirror, Shared Current, Balance and Holding the Line. These titles suggest relation and maintenance rather than flight into a distant era. The gallery frames the work as a challenge to the assumption that tradition and modernity must be opposed.
That framing returns to the tension present in Remember the Future. A painted figure can be marked by inherited forms and technological references at once. By 2025, Osadebe had moved through multiple scales and settings: a Lagos solo show, paintings on a London stage-like gallery floor, a commission for a national institution, and new work presented in New York. The route is international, but the artist remains based in Lagos. It is important to keep that center visible. A global exhibition history does not mean the work’s place of making has become irrelevant.
Osadebe has also worked with brands, including Hermès and the NBA. Such projects can extend an artist’s imagery to audiences beyond a gallery, but they have different demands and credits from a solo exhibition. His official site lists them alongside his painting practice. The breadth matters because he has long resisted being confined to one market’s expectations of African art. He can make a painted canvas, a public digital project or a designed object without granting any one format authority over the others.
Krull’s interview about futuristic dreams in the Congo diaspora offers readers another way to consider how fashion, image-making and inherited histories can stage a different present. Osadebe’s contribution to that discussion begins with pictorial choices: the Ankara cloth inside a spacesuit, the mask within a theatrical room, the iro on a ballerina. These pairings work because each element remains specific. A future imagined from Lagos need not erase the materials, garments and stories already there.
The spacesuit in Remember the Future remains an arresting emblem, but it is not the whole practice. Modern Magic brings the figure onto a stage where light and architecture change what can be known about them. Please Enter places a garment in conversation with an institution’s art and dance histories. Forcing Connections takes relation itself as a subject. Across these works, Osadebe asks a consistent question: what happens when the familiar arrangements of culture are loosened enough for another person to step into view? His pictures do not wait for an imagined century to answer. They begin with the materials of the present and give them a different way to meet.