With Happy group show, O’DA Art Gallery explore meanings of happiness, joy

Stirring deep emotions in viewers and questioning what being happy truly means, O’DA Art Gallery is proud to present the group show titled Happy.

The show which opened on April 4, 2026 will run till the 25th of April 2026 at the gallery’s grounds in Victoria Island, Lagos.

The group show brings together the works of eight bright artists who try to define what the state of happiness is and how it presents differently to different people.

Happy is not approached as a fixed emotion, but as a condition. It is fleeting, constructed, pursued and at times, performed.

The works in this exhibition resist the simplicity of happiness as lightness or ease. Instead, they examine it as something layered, a surface that can shimmer while holding weight beneath. What appears effortless is often held up by something unseen.

“Happy proposes that joy is not the absence of complexity, but its companion. It is something we arrive at, return to, lose, and remake, again and again,” says Obida Obioha, the curator at O’DA Gallery.

Across the presentation, happiness appears in fragments through colour, gesture, memory and form. Ayanfe Olarinde explores happiness as it is shaped by the tension of transition, by what is withheld and what has been endured.

Alfa Abdulkadir flattens time, presenting a futuristic vision of happiness while interrogating our inseparability from technology and Abba Makama’s pieces are informed by the knowledge that joy is often temporary and therefore precious – in this way, happiness becomes inseparable from time, something that is felt most acutely in its passing.

There is no singular register of joy here. Moyosore Jolaolu and Lawrence Meju lean into brightness and expansion, where colour and form open outward, almost insistently.

Musa Ganiyy and Osione Itegboje find it in moments of release, in quiet intimacies, in pleasure and in play, while Williams Chechet sits in ambiguity, where happiness is less visible but deeply present as pride, as resilience, as survival, and an insistence on being.

These works ask the viewer to look more closely, to recognise that joy does not always announce itself. It can be subtle, internal, even contradictory.

The artists do not ask what happiness looks like, but rather how it is felt, remembered and negotiated. How it lingers after a moment has passed. How it is reconstructed through memory.

How it coexists with longing, with uncertainty, with the realities of contemporary life. Happiness, in this sense, is not an endpoint, but a process, something continuously
made and remade.

Within the context of O’DA Art, where beauty is understood as a form of elevation and healing, Happy extends this inquiry. It suggests that joy is not superficial, nor is it detached from complexity.

It is something that can hold weight, something that can carry us, even briefly, beyond the immediate conditions of our lives.
Taken together, Happy proposes that joy is not the absence of complexity, but its companion.

It is something we arrive at, return to, lose and remake, again and again.

Based in Lagos, O’DA Art Gallery is dedicated to amplifying African and diasporic voices within the global cultural landscape.

From its inception, O’DA has distinguished itself with a clear focus on abstract figuration, and the evolving visual languages of originality and intuition.

In just a few years, O’DA has participated in international art fairs, hosted nomadic artistresidencies, and mounted ambitious exhibitions that have resonated with collectors, curators, and institutions alike.

Recent highlights include Black Figuration Is Alive and Well (2025), a landmark group exhibition gathering sixteen artists redefining portraiture and figuration.