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.
During a residency with the gallery in Venice this spring, Ikhide began a series of tempera paintings which he later completed upon his return to London.
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.
The exhibition is accompanied by a new text, entitled Maestri, by Dr Minna Moore Ede.
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‘Reclaiming elements of early Italian painting, Ikhide draws authority from the historical tradition, but he also expands it. Infusing it with his own unique mythology, he recodes its values and makes it his own.’
– Minna Moore Ede
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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.
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‘Carlo Crivelli’s portrayals of the Holy Family struck a chord with Ikhide, who has recently had a child himself. In his painting, Youths, the Christian story is reworked and Ikhide’s Matri and Patri figures are presided over by an egungun – an ancestor spirit masquerading as a crocodile.’
– Minna Moore Ede
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Richard Ayodeji Ikhide, Communion, 2025 -
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‘I imagine the vessel’s presence as a source of strength, giving the protagonist the assurance to step out into the wider world or go forth on his journey with the knowledge of ancestry and culture informing who they are.’
– Richard Ayodeji Ikhide
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.
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Richard Ayodeji Ikhide, Blessing, 2025
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For Ikhide, these figures and spaces in Incroci del Passato (Crossroads of the Past) are not prescriptions but open sites of interpretation – personal mythologies that resonate with wider traditions of initiation and ritual, asking how individuals engage with their past to carry their knowledge into the present.
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Richard Ayodeji Ikhide: Maestri
By Dr Minna Moore Ede→ Read here -
About the artist
Photography: Andrea Rossetti -
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