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Written By
Folake Ajao
Growing up Nigerian meant art had to justify its own existence against the unyielding gravity of white collar security, the quiet pressure to choose a path with a title and a payslip attached to it. For Alexander Ebadan, also known as Mr. Baker, it was no different. There was a stretch of years, he says, as recent as the last two, where wanting to be an artist still was not met with much encouragement, and choosing it anyway meant tuning out most of the voices around him. “It required a lot of disobedience because it’s not easy to just be a full time artist, especially in Nigeria,” he says.
That disobedience became the engine behind his debut solo exhibition, ‘Catharsis,’ presented on 15 August 2026 in collaboration with Yaa Asantewaa Agency. The show transformed a private apartment in Ikoyi into a one-night gallery, nine works in oil and acrylic on canvas sitting inside the rooms of a home instead of the walls of a white cube. Guests moved through the space itself as part of the work, the apartment folding into the exhibition. Chef TYB handled food for the night, adding a layer of intimacy to an evening built around gathering, not just viewing.
The collection traces back to a period of physical injury. “I had a really bad back injury and it forced me to slow down,” Ebadan says. “Even through the pain of my body, my mind was loud and that was much more painful, so I wanted to release everything.” Painting became the outlet. “This series is a self documentary,” he says. “ I went through a cathartic process.”
The nine pieces that make up the collection, Tranquility, Solace, Aftermath, Open, Taste of Sunlight, Catharsis, Dreaming of Heaven and Somewhere Bleu, move through exhaustion and the quiet that settles after letting go. Asked which piece was hardest to make emotionally, Ebadan paused before naming the title piece, Catharsis itself, the painting closest to the pain that started the whole collection.
At the centre of the apartment stood a leafless tree, bare and stripped down to its branches, standing in for everything the exhibition was built around. Guests were handed paper airplanes and asked to write down what they wanted to let go of and send them into the tree’s branches. By the end of the night, the tree carried a small flock of them, each one holding something a guest had chosen to release, turning the installation into a shared, physical extension of the exhibition’s central theme. The night drew a warm turnout from across Lagos’ creative community, family and familiar faces moving through the apartment late into the evening.
Ebadan came to painting through poetry first, and that background shows in the restraint and rhythm running through the work, in the way each piece leaves space rather than filling it. He wants viewers to see themselves inside it. “I want them to come here and experience my catharsis and see themselves in it, to mirror themselves in all the paintings,” he says, encouraging guests to sit with the poems placed alongside the paintings for added context before writing their own release and sending it off into the tree.
For Ebadan, finishing the collection did not close something off. “It feels like release and shows the birth of something new,” he says. Catharsis argues that surrender is not defeat. Sometimes it is where peace begins.
© 2026 Afreoriginals.