- Medium
- Mixed media on canvas
- Size
- Enquire
- Year
- 2026
- Edition
- Original · 1 of 1
Details
His forearm comes up from the lower left and takes the weight of his head, the jaw settled on the back of his own hand. Flat terracotta fills the canvas, unmodulated, the weave showing through it, and he sits bare against it with the head fallen to one side. The afro breaks into the red at its edges. Shoulders and collarbone are indicated in ochre, olive, and umber. The face is heavy-lidded, the eyes lowered, the mouth closed and level, with faint red marks running along one cheek. What the title names is a ceremony, and the canvas carries none of its equipment: no gown, no cap, no scroll. The scale of graduate unemployment in Nigeria is what Azekwoh painted it out of, a country where the qualification arrives and the work does not. The young man is left holding his own head up in an empty red room.
