1-54 New York 2026: Afeez Onakoya, Deborah Segun and Soji Adesina

Hyper Figuration assembles the practices of Deborah Segun, Soji Adesina, and Afeez Onakoya to examine an intensified mode of figuration, one in which scale, proportion, and colour are strategically amplified to communicate emotional and psychological resonance. Here, the figure is not merely a subject of representation but an activated field through which identity, perception, and interiority are negotiated.

The artists in this presentation each approach distortion as a purposeful intervention. Rather than exaggeration for its own sake, hyper figuration becomes a method for heightening presence, emphasising narrative, and challenging normative expectations of realism.

Deborah Segun approaches hyper-figuration through reduction, stylisation, and the careful orchestration of geometric planes. Her figures are constructed through simplified contours, flattened forms, and controlled shapes that emphasise emotion through composition rather than anatomy. Her exaggeration is subtle and structural: proportion is adjusted not to dramatise the body, but to highlight gesture, intimacy, and relational dynamics. The result is a quiet intensity, figures that are abstracted yet deeply expressive.

Soji Adesina pushes colour into a territory that becomes psychological. His bold palettes sometimes saturated, sometimes sharply contrasted challenge conventional expectations of skin and identity. Rather than modifying anatomy, he uses colour as distortion, creating heightened emotional readings of the body. Through this chromatic expansion, Soji reframes how we understand “coloured skin,” turning the figure into a site of cultural assertion, multiplicity, and surface tension.

Afeez Onakoya employs precision, balance, and spatial control to build figures that feel suspended, distilled, and symbolically charged. His distortions come from proportion and placement: widened forms, deliberate contours, and a graphic clarity that gives the figure both density and stillness.

Together, these three artists demonstrate how figuration can be intensified without losing subtlety. Hyper-Figuration here is not about spectacle; it is about focus. By amplifying specific elements shape, colour, contour, structure they open pathways for deeper reading and emotional engagement. In their hands, distortion becomes truth, and the figure becomes a vessel for layered narratives within contemporary African art.