When Charcoal Meets Steel, the Gèlè Takes Centre Stage

Yinka Olatunbosun

Alexis Galleries is bringing two distinct artistic visions of the Yoruba headtie to the fore in Gèlè, a dual exhibition featuring Arinze Stanley and Dotun Popoola, opening on October 24 at the gallery’s Akin Olugbade Street premises on Victoria Island, Lagos. Running until November 7, the exhibition explores the gèlè as more than an emblem of cultural identity: it is a statement of femininity, dignity and self-expression.
Worn by women across Nigeria and other parts of West Africa, the traditional headtie can signal celebration, social standing and personal style. In the hands of Stanley and Popoola, it becomes a subject for two markedly different artistic approaches. Stanley’s hyperrealistic charcoal and graphite drawings probe the human face, while Popoola’s welded-metal sculptures give the familiar headwear a monumental, almost architectural presence.
Internationally recognised for his arresting monochrome portraits, Stanley is taking a different direction with his Gèlè series. Unlike earlier bodies of work such as The Machine Man and The Bullets and Denim, which confront harsher realities, the new works express his admiration for women.

“It is very special to me because of how it is worn. You know, the women get to choose how they want to style their gèlè,” he said at the press preview.
That freedom of choice appears central to Stanley’s interpretation. The elaborate folds and contours of the headtie frame his subjects, but the women’s faces remain the real centre of attention. Through minute gradations of charcoal and graphite, he captures expressions that invite a closer reading, suggesting lives and experiences that extend beyond the picture plane.
“Their faces are not secondary to the gèlè; they hold our attention,” the gallery’s curatorial team observes. “There is a quietness and intensity in their expressions that suggests an interior world beyond what is immediately visible. The gèlè frames these women, but it does not define them.”
If Stanley approaches the subject through the intimacy of the drawn face, Popoola takes a more muscular route. Known for transforming discarded scrap metal, automotive parts and industrial iron into sculptural forms, he turns the gèlè into an exercise in volume, movement and material reinvention. What might once have been destined for the scrapyard acquires a second life as a sculptural crown, its sweeping contours recalling the folds and flourishes of the traditional headtie.

For Popoola, who has spent decades welding scrap metal into ambitious sculptural forms, the challenge lies in coaxing grace from materials more readily associated with weight and rigidity. His works offer a striking counterpoint to Stanley’s delicately rendered portraits, translating the gèlè’s visual drama into steel and salvaged industrial fragments.
Together, the artists trace the headtie’s passage from cultural adornment to a potent means of self-representation. Co-curated by Uche Obasi and Chidera Ogbu, the exhibition asks viewers to look beyond the gèlè as an item of fashion and consider how women use it to assert identity, negotiate social expectations and present themselves to the world.
The contrast is immediate: charcoal against steel, the intimacy of the human face against the commanding presence of sculpture, meticulous tonal gradations against the rough textures of reclaimed metal. Yet both artists return to the same cultural object, finding in its folds and flourishes a language capable of accommodating different ideas of womanhood.

With Gèlè, Alexis Galleries continues its engagement with contemporary Nigerian art, bringing together two artists whose practices differ sharply in material and method but converge in their interest in cultural expression. The exhibition promises a meeting of portraiture and sculpture in which a familiar headtie becomes something more than an accessory: a symbol of how women choose to be seen.