In Conversation with Ayoola Gbolahan: Documenting Culture, Spirituality, and the Blue Woman

Ayoola Gbolahan is not one to hurry meaning along. He allows his ideas to settle first, much like his canvases which are layered, deliberate, and resistant to quick interpretation. His paintings have a way of stopping people mid-step at exhibitions, carrying something unplaceable with symbols which feel both ancient and invented. His figures seem to exist between worlds rather than within them.

Portrait Photograph of Ayoola Gbolahan.

For anyone paying attention to the sharper edge of contemporary African art, Gbolahan’s name has been gathering weight for some time. His work sits in the collections of the World Bank and the National Gallery of Art in Abuja. It has travelled. It has entered institutional memory. But the man himself resists the gravity that kind of recognition tends to create. He is more interested in the question than the answer, and that tension carries into the work he continues to produce.

Gbolahan grew up moving between three worlds. There was Ibadan, one of the most culturally dense cities in West Africa, where elite families existed within a seamless social ecology. "It takes a village to raise a child," he says. "I experienced that firsthand. If you misbehaved in your house, just know that all the other families would hear your story." These were not abstract cultural lessons. They were lived ones, absorbed into the body before the mind had language for them.

Then there was time spent with his grandmother, a queen, in a smaller town, where he encountered rivers, farms, and a way of life Ibadan had already begun to shed. And there was his uncle’s compound, where architecture, fashion, and language arrived in a different register entirely.

Copy of the Blue Woman.

Introducing The Blue Woman

No body of work carries this spiritual weight more completely than the Blue Woman series, the centrepiece of his upcoming exhibition.

Between 2006 and 2010, Gbolahan developed a practice of painting his subconscious directly, bypassing editorial thought and translating nocturnal images onto canvas as faithfully and immediately as possible. One night during this period, an apparition appeared: a woman with blue skin, seated inside a giant red stiletto shoe that resembled a boat. He woke and painted her immediately. At the time, he assigned no particular meaning to it. It was simply what he had seen.

In 2011, she returned. He felt compelled to explore her again and again, not as different women, but as variations of a single energy. The blue skin, the stillness, the presence, these did not belong to a human figure. They belonged to something that preceded it.

Blue Woman Scarf Front

Blue Woman Scarf Back.

“It was more like a spiritual being called a woman. The feminine energy. Not a female in a human body, but this energy.”

He is precise about the distinction. The Blue Woman is not a portrait. She is not a political symbol. She is an inquiry into the nature of feminine energy, traced, in his words, back to the moment of creation itself.

"What does it mean to be female energy? I tend to go as far back as creation itself, when that energy was formed. What does it mean? These are the questions I’ve been asking."

As a man, he acknowledges the paradox at the centre of this pursuit. He has spent years asking a question he may never fully answer. Some have suggested the real inquiry is the feminine within the male. He does not dismiss the idea. He simply says he has not arrived there.

"I’ve resolved to see it as a lifelong task. After painting her for this long, I don’t think I will ever fully understand what it means to be female. I think I will die still asking that question through my work."

The Blue Woman Editorial Shoot

One of Gbolahan's most radical qualities is the fact he refuses to be categorised, considering himself not an African artist, but "an artist who is African". The distinction matters more than it first appears. When he works from a subconscious state, absorbing architecture in Greece, fashion in Paris, ritual in Benin, food in India, and releases all of it onto a single canvas, the result cannot be contained by geography. Viewers have stood before his paintings and argued about their origin. Is it Yoruba? Greek? Mexican? Indian?

"When I work, I absorb everything," he explains. "And when I’m painting, I release it onto the canvas. So when I finish, it feels like many experiences from different places exist in one work."

As opposed to this being a cultural dilution of Gbolohan's roots, this in fact represents his global vision, as his subject, human anthropology, belongs to no single tradition. When a viewer in France encounters something familiar in his work, that recognition is not accidental. It is the result of an artist who has cast his net wide enough to hold many histories at once.

On Institutional Recognition

When institutional recognition came, the World Bank, the National Gallery, it amplified his sense of purpose. "Public collections are like putting your message on a radio station, as opposed to listening through your earphones," he says. "My goal is for people to engage with my work and reflect on the human experience."

When the conversation turns to the Nigerian arts ecosystem, Gbolahan immediately begins with the uncomfortable assertion of engagement with art. There are residencies. There are museums, the Shyllon Museum in Lekki, the Ọ̀pẹ́ Museum, the National Museum in Onikan, the Museum of West African Art in Benin. These, however, largely remain under-visited because the culture of going has not fully taken root.

"Do we have it in us, as a people, to just wake up and say, ‘Let’s go to a museum?’ Is it part of our culture?"

He is not cynical about the answer, only diagnostic. Engagement creates demand. Demand creates delivery. Lagos has already demonstrated this logic: Detty December has driven the proliferation of restaurants, short-term rentals, and nightlife. Applied deliberately to cultural institutions, that same energy could reshape the ecosystem for the generation coming after him. Build the largest museum in the world," he says. "But if society does not engage, what is the point?"

When asked what he hopes audiences will carry with them from the Blue Woman series, today, a decade from now, a century from now, Gbolahan does not hesitate that he wants the work to function as a window. "A window to see deeply into what it means to be female," he says. "Not necessarily from the opposite sex, even a woman looking at the Blue Woman should see it as a path to self-understanding."

And for the skeptics, the passers-by who stop mid-step and cannot name what they are feeling, he wants the same unresolved question he carries to transfer, gently, to them. "If we refer to earth as Mother Earth, I want to believe that even the opposite sex might understand their own creation by questioning the meaning of this feminine energy. Because at the end of the day, were we not all born by one?"