What happens when an artist’s journey is seen not only through the works he creates, but through the eyes of someone who has watched, collected and preserved that journey?

This weekend at Quintessence Gallery, Lagos, that question will take a particularly interesting form as Professor Ebun Clark opens her private collection of works by artist Alimi Adewale to the public.

Words Ireho Aito | Don’t Keep Your Art in the Finger!

There is a particular intimacy in seeing an artist through the eyes of a collector. The relationship goes beyond ownership. It speaks to recognition, patience and the ability to look at an artwork and see something that may not yet be obvious to everyone else. This is the spirit behind Collector Studies: A Collector’s Eye, a new exhibition by Quintessence Gallery, having with Professor Ebun Clark and her collection of works by Nigerian artist Alimi Adewale.

For Professor Clark, collecting has never been about simply filling walls. Her journey began in 1964 with antique masks while she was a lecturer at the University of Ibadan. By 1965, after moving to Lagos and visiting one of the modernists, Bruce Onobrakpeya with the help of her renowned husband Prof. J. P. Clark, she had begun collecting prints and developed the remarkable relationship with Bruce Onobrakpeya that would become one of the defining stories of her life as a collector. Her instinct was often to look beyond what was immediately obvious. At Bruce’s old studio back then, not the current one, she once picked up a print the artist himself had discarded because he was dissatisfied with the result. She kept it. “Don’t worry, I will keep it,” she told him. That simple decision has come to represent much of what makes her eye so important and the willingness to recognise value before consensus arrives.

Bruce Onobrakpeya would later describe the significance of her patronage in words that remain powerful: “She is a builder that created a rock foundation.” Dr. Kunle Adeyemi similarly described Clark as “a kingmaker in the art world,” explaining that she does not simply collect but studies artists, supports them and backs her words with action and finances.

It is this history that gives A Collector’s Eye: Prof. Ebun Clark on Artist Alimi Adewale its particular meaning. Adewale occupies a distinctive place in contemporary Nigerian art, developing a practice across painting, sculpture and installation while repeatedly returning to the city, its people, movement, pressure and contradictions. This self – taught artist work has examined urbanisation, modern development and the lives of ordinary people, using rich textures, abstraction and sculptural surfaces to create images that feel both immediate and considered. It is also interesting to know that his journey from mechanical engineering into art, through his apprenticeship with Kamoru Sarumi and subsequent international workshops and residencies, has produced a practice that continues to move between disciplines and ideas.

For Adewale, the city is never merely a background. It is a living subject. Its crowds, movement, architecture, ambition and anxieties become material for examining how people exist within rapidly changing environments. His own description of Lagos captures that attraction too, “The people, the lifestyle, the spirit and the energy.” That interest in everyday life has remained central to his practice from the early 2000s, giving his work a documentary quality even when the image moves towards abstraction.

That is where the collector’s eye becomes important. Professor Clark has spent decades demonstrating that collecting can be a form of cultural authorship. As iBAND previously documented, Mudiare Onobrakpeya described her collection as “transnational and transgenerational,” calling it a cultural roadmap of Nigeria’s modernist evolution. Clark herself has repeatedly spoken about the importance of understanding what one collects and why. “You must know what to collect, why you are collecting, and never forget that history and time will eventually come calling,” she said.

A Collector’s Eye therefore offers more than an opportunity to see Alimi Adewale through a private collection. It invites viewers to consider what happens when an experienced collector encounters an artist whose work speaks to the complexities of contemporary life. The exhibition becomes a conversation between two forms of looking, that is, the artist looking at society and the collector looking at the artist.

Quintessence Gallery will present the first edition of Collector Studies: A Collector’s Eye – Prof. Ebun Clark on Artist Alimi Adewale on Saturday, September 12, 2026, at 5:00pm at 285 Akin Olugbade Street, Lagos. Drawn from Professor Clark’s private collection, the exhibition offers a focused encounter with Adewale’s work while also opening another chapter in the story of one of Nigeria’s most important collectors.

Professor Clark once said of her collecting journey, “I just want to share my pleasure.” That may be the simplest way to understand this exhibition. The collector keeps looking, the artist keeps making, and eventually the two meet in the space where art becomes memory.

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