‘Family Ties’ by Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola

‘Family Ties’ by Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola

On the second floor, the Arts Club Dubai presents a solo exhibition of works by Nigerian American artist Anthony Akinbola, who was born in 1991 in Columbia, Missouri, and grew
up between Nigeria and the United States. He now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Akinbola’s practice uses everyday materials, from palm oil to hair picks. This exhibition features works composed out of durag, the fabric scarves worn to protect and shape hair. The artist purchases and collects these garments from retailers, and also manufactures his own from raw material. He treats each as a found object and as a unit of colour, using the durag as a “ready- made object” in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp, who first presented everyday manufactured items as art.

This thinking runs through his Camouflage series, which began in 2018 with a forty foot installation of more than a thousand durags in the Queens Museum. The series title refers both to the fabric disappearing into the composition and to the durag as a tool for assimilating into Western beauty standards. His 2025 exhibition with Sean Kelly also introduced “brick” paintings and framed the durag works as studies in colour and abstraction. Akinbola employs ordinary materials to embed within his work a dialogue between art-historical practices and a lived, diasporic Black experience. In the studio, he tests what the fabric can achieve compositionally.

The Arrangement works of 2026, his newest body of work, take the durag off the flat. Folded and gathered into dense clusters of bloom, as in the blue hydrangea of Dearest Hydrangea, they turn a material of daily life into a bouquet and reference to the longstanding tradition of floral and naturalist subject matter that precedes him.

Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola
Arrangement #5 (Dearest
Hydrangea), 2026
Durag on wooden panel
168 x 274 cm
66 1/8 x 107 7/8 in

Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola
Arrangement #9 (Audrey), 2026
Durag on wooden panel
152 x 123 cm
59 7/8 x 48 3/8 in

Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola
Arrangement #15 (Spring
Flower), 2026
Durag on wooden panel
137 x 183 cm
54 x 72 in

Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola
CAMOUFLAGE Study (Grey), 2022
Durag on wooden panel
122 x 122 cm
48 x 48 in

Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola
Family Ties,
2025
Durag on
wooden panel,
152.4 x 305 cm
60 x 120 1/8 in