RICHARD AYODEJI IKHIDE: INCROCI DEL PASSATO (CROSSROADS OF THE PAST)
VICTORIA MIRO is delighted to present Incroci del Passato (Crossroads of the Past), an exhibition of paintings by Richard Ayodeji Ikhide commenced during a recent residency with the gallery in Venice.
November 01 – December 13, 2025
Working in egg tempera on panel for the first time, the artist seeks to bridge artistic traditions ranging from the devotional paintings of the Italian Renaissance to the ritual objects and ancestral knowledge of his Nigerian heritage. Archetypal figures emerge – parents, children, seekers, holy families – each inhabiting charged symbolic landscapes where the sacred, the ancestral and the personal intersect.
Ikhide began experimenting with the medium, learning to mix his own paints from egg yolk and pigment, while studying depictions of hermit saints and early tempera works by Italian painters such as Carlo Crivelli. A period of seclusion away from his own family shaped a series of deeply personal works that explore the balance between devotion and self-discovery.
Patri portrays a male figure mixing pigments in solitude, a reference to St Jerome but also to the artist’s early days in Venice, alone and experimenting with tempera under the gaze of an ancestral presence. Its counterpart, Matri, situates a female figure in the wilderness alongside effigies and a dolmen – at once portal, womb and tomb – signifying feminine power as a threshold to life and the generative power of the maternal.
Images of vessels, references to Nok terracotta found in the southwestern part of Nigeria, represent the family unit or the importance of masculine and feminine energies being in balance.
This meditation on sacred objects evolved alongside the artist’s rigorous exploration of egg tempera. Tempera’s precise, linear mark-making, in which colour is built up through layers of translucent strokes, as well as its luminous quality, allowed Ikhide to translate the graphic quality of his pen-and-ink works into a medium whose longevity echoes the artist’s own concern with ancestry and continuity.
The recurring boy figure in Assurance, Manifest and Carry Forth embodies the quest for both self and ancestral knowledge: carrying vessels, confronting the viewer or meditating among effigies, he traverses landscapes of growth, death and rebirth. His journey recalls the structure of the hero’s journey, not only as an outward passage into otherworldly realities but also an inward descent into the unconscious, where he confronts challenges that lead to greater awareness.