Leonard Iheagwam’s first solo show in Lagos “Nourishment” at Nahous shouldn’t be missed
Leonard “Soldier” Iheagwam’s exhibition “Nourishment” at Nahous analyses our relationship to the foods that we know, love and eat daily in Nigeria. The exhibition tackles our perception of recognisable labels and why we feel such a strong connection with them. Before entering the show, there is a kiosk that sits at the entrance filled with bottles of Fanta and Coca-Cola. There are also sachets of Ovaltine, Milo, Peak milk, Golden Morn, boxes of St.Louis sugar, Geisha tin tomatoes, Indomine and more. The viewer is transported to a place of familiarity — filled with a sense of warmth and knowing.
Soldier’s paintings for “Nourishment” are colourful, playing with ideas of abstraction and exploring the parameters of pop art. While rooted in joy and our collective memory, the show also highlights classism, survival, and threads of the Civil War. These constructs have shaped our journey as a country and reflect why we rely heavily on branded food products.
Leonard “Soldier” Iheagwam is carving his own path
In this exclusive interview, Soldier opens up about the ideas driving the work and what informs the stylistic choices of these new paintings and sculptures. As this exhibition is his first solo show in Lagos, “Nourishment” is an ode to his upbringing as a boy born and raised in the city. When Richard, the founder of Nahous, reached out to Soldier, he offered him an incredible location. Nahous is located at the Old Federal Palace Hotel, a place known for the FESTAC 1977 World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture and also the place where the Nigerian Declaration of Independence was signed. A perfect place to present a young artist’s progressive and significant works that analyse the current state of our country.
Soldier is no stranger to pushing boundaries, from the streetwear brand he founded with friends in 2018, “Motherlan”, he has grown to collaborate with Louis Vuitton, Marni, Timbaland, Nike and more. His fine art paintings for exhibitions like “Black Star” , “When the Saints Go Marching” and now “Nourishment” reintroduce him to the public. He is a multifaceted, talented artist interested in leaving a stamp on culture and making a name for himself.
Let’s start at the beginning. How did you get into painting?
Painting has been something that I have always done since I was a younger kid. It’s something that, for some reason, has always called to me. I can trace the beginning of my interest to my primary and secondary school. I used to take visual arts very seriously, to the point where I got awarded ‘Best in Visual Arts’ towards my later years of my secondary school at St. Gregory’s in Ikoyi.
In the art program, we would draw a lot of still life. I loved drawing, especially the human form and learning how to use different materials. It was okay, could have been better, but it was okay.
What drew you back to painting? I know you said it’s something that you have always been drawn to and called to you. But was there a specific moment that you thought, “Okay, I’m going to start painting, and I’m going to do this on a larger scale?”
I do a lot of creative things, especially when I was a bit younger. A couple of years back, I did a lot of design. I love experimenting with any art form to express myself. I remember doing some early paintings during lockdown, inspired by camouflage for self-expression, and that’s when it stuck.
Tell me a little bit more about where the idea of the show “Nourishment” came from?
You can trace the history of a society using several things. You can use music, fashion, the economy, and you can also use food. Some of my earliest memories growing up in Nigeria were always centred around food. I don’t mean just properly cooked food, but it was tiny snacks, like drinking bottles of Coke. I have nostalgic memories tied to certain logos and certain brands of food.
Basically, food is something that I grew up with, and it’s something that always crosses my mind. For some reason, I wanted to do something with the logos of several foods that are attached to our collective memories. With these paintings, I had this idea of shedding light on the way the country uses food. I wanted to say something quite serious; I didn’t just want to paint a pretty picture. It was important that I talk about something quite serious and represent something real. That’s how I shifted into the idea of nourishment.
Stylistically, your painting style for “Nourishment” is different from the last few shows, like “Black Star”. How did you decide on the style for “Nourishment?
For this show, I got all the logos out and I did a bunch of collages with the different logos before I started painting. I loved how colourful the collages were, and my paintings were my reaction to that feeling. The reason the style is different is that I wanted to do something abstract. I usually create figurative work, focusing on ideas that explore the human form. Frequently, I like testing myself from exhibition to exhibition, and I enjoy pivoting from idea to idea. I think that’s why there’s a change in the work, but stylistically, they are mainly a reaction to these collages.
However, for the work, I was also asking a question: If pop art is from a culture that is not so popular, if not so many people know several brands and if it’s not Westernised, is it really pop art?
I think Nigeria is one of the most influential countries around the world in terms of arts and culture. But when I look at certain things, not only the commercialisation of the food, but also the reason the food came into the country and the conversations that surround it.
The reason you can trace, let’s say, a civil war to the relief foods to our current economy, right now, those cannons are not as popularised or Westernised. I think my job as a Nigerian artist is to shed light on these cannons to make it even more prevalent, especially in the context of pop art and pop culture.
Can you explain how the Civil War mentioned in the exhibition text influenced the works on display?
I’ll just keep it light with the Civil War. You can trace the influx of the introduction of certain types of foods that we can call relief food from the Civil War that happened years ago. A war tends to shape the landscape of a country or society. The Civil War shaped the landscape of Nigeria, not just from the perspective of our economy but also from the perspective of food.
Decisions have been made that have led us to a point where people in this country do not have enough money to purchase a particular type of fresh food. Many people unknowingly lean into a heavily processed food diet; they use vegetable oil with higher cholesterol. These companies come in with their product, and then they market it and wrap it around Nigerian life. To the point that Nigerians think these brands are nutritious. But some of these foods have some chemicals that are not healthy and can be harmful. And this is happening in a purely agricultural country.
Nigeria is an amazing country in Africa where you can plant anything, and it’s in our culture for us to be very agricultural. But certain key moments have created a shift that has left us where we are today. I feel like the exhibition is a vehicle to explore these ideas.
The exhibition text also references class and survival. Could you elaborate on how these themes are explored within the exhibition?
In Nigeria, there are not many systems in place where people have an even playing field. There’s barely any in between the super-rich and extremely poor. I grew up witnessing people barely surviving. They barely had money to spend. The economy is also getting progressively worse, with people looking for jobs. The people who get things either strive extremely hard, or there’s nepotism involved, which, again, it’s quite interesting to see, and everything almost seems like a vacuum of some sort. It feels like there is no help from the government to help the average Nigerian. Everyone seems like they’re on their own, and that can create a hostile culture that is really high, and everyone feels it.
Classism and survival are just something that we can’t really run away from in a country like Nigeria. We do have the resources to change it, and doing a body of work like this is to start that conversation to make things better for the average person.
Nigeria is a special country that I know, and that has shaped my reality since the earliest part of my life. It’s a country that my culture and family come from. As a painter and as an artist, I see myself as a historian. As I talk about my past, I also talk about the country’s past.
This segues into my next question. Tell me a little bit about your upbringing.
My earliest memories were in Lagos. I was born and raised here. My parents were born here in Lagos as well. My parents moved around from place to place, but I mostly grew up on the mainland. I didn’t grow up rich, hence the activism in my body of work. I grew up almost with the outcasts because my dad’s work as a Pastor required him to be in different churches. In church, there are the rich people, but there are also a lot of poor people who reach out to religion, to God, as some sort of safety net because of how hard things are.
I’ve kind of seen the underbelly of Nigeria as a country, and I was lucky enough to get an amazing perspective from my upbringing here. I guess my family life required me to be outside enough for me to understand a certain perspective of what class is.
Not from inside a house, and not from the perspective of being rich and seeing a point of view. It was more like — I felt this, I bought this, my parents used to cook in this, we didn’t have that, it was a life built around a reaction to where we were at economically.
How does it feel to have your first solo show in Lagos, especially given that your work is so deeply rooted in Nigerian culture?
It feels really great. Being able to return home and start planting seeds for a bigger narrative and exhibiting not only in London but also in Lagos is a good way to start a conversation between multiple continents.
I feel it’s truly an honour and a blessing to be able to do this. Coming back home feels amazing — not just returning, but coming back while presenting an idea, asking a question, and perhaps starting a conversation. That has been incredibly important to me.
Can you tell me more about the installation in the middle gallery with the IV bags connected to Fanta, Coke, Peak milk, and other food items? I’m also curious about what inspired the sculpture of the stomach and intestines.
Let’s start with the sculpture of the stomach and intestines. The paintings are quite colourful; they are meant to be inviting; the use of branding, graphic design, colour, form and text is meant to draw the viewer in. But then the sculpture is six feet tall and black. When you see the inside of the organs of the human body, there’s a reaction you get that’s a bit uncomfortable. Something that is inside of something it’s just uncomfortable to see. What I mean is, when you kill a cow or an animal, looking inside has a kind of grotesque effect — I call it the rot. It’s meant to be the rot. It’s the effect of being seen from the inside.
What fascinates me most is how you start with these memorable paintings featuring familiar logos and foods, only to be taken on a journey that gradually turns sinister. The sculpture of the stomach is meant to be the elephant in the room, which forces you not to ignore the darkness of the show. It’s meant to be the feeling of the rot in our economy, the rot in our food system, the rot in our society, the rot in the effect of processed food.
It’s just also meant to show our unhealthy attachments to all these processed foods; many of them also don’t benefit the average day-to-day Nigerian. There’s capitalism at play. It’s one thing if people are buying these processed foods and the money from it is going back into our society, but that’s not the case. There’s an unhealthy attachment to things that don’t serve us. There’s decay here. And I think these two installations are meant to showcase that.
How did the collaboration with Nahous come about?
Two years ago, I met Richard through a mutual friend Teezee, and we had a couple conversations a few years later. We met because he has a couple of locations for Windsor Gallery across Africa. And Teezee was like, “You guys should connect.” When we connected, Richard had amazing ideas. He asked, “Do you want to have your first show at Nahous? Here’s an amazing space”.
The Federal Palace Hotel has a lot of cultural relevance. The Declaration of Independence was signed there in that same vicinity. For me, it made sense to do my first exhibition in a very important hotel in Nigerian history because I think this is very important work that represents a new way of seeing.
Because of the venue and it was also my first solo exhibition in Lagos, I wanted the exhibition to be a homecoming exhibition — I didn’t want to just paint a pretty picture. I wanted it to be very important to me. It was essential that this work felt very different from the way I think people perceive Nigerian and African art, which is a lot of figurative work.
For this, I wanted to create something quite fresh and timely. It needed to be something very reminiscent of home, culture, class, economy, and community, all in a series of paintings, which I think I was able to capture very well within the context.
Read more: Uzo Njoku on her journey to becoming an artist and the inspiration behind “The Owambe Exhibition”
