ECCE UOMO: Masculinity in Contemporary African Art

OOA Gallery presents ECCE UOMO, a group exhibition for Pride Month bringing together eleven artists to explore masculinity, identity, and representation through contemporary African and diasporic art.

About the Exhibition

ECCE UOMO brings together eleven artists whose works open a nuanced reflection on masculinity as image, presence, construction, and lived experience. Presented by OOA Gallery during Pride Month, the exhibition proposes not a fixed definition of manhood, but a space in which masculine identity may be observed in its plurality: vulnerable and composed, intimate and performative, self-aware and socially inscribed.

Featuring works by Abel Beyene, Angèle Etoundi Essamba, Emeka Udemba, Matthew Eguavoen, Michael Ebuka, Modou, Moses Zibor, Oliver Okolo, Okoye Chukwuemeka John, Opeyemi Matthew Olukotun, and REWA, ECCE UOMO unfolds as a conversation across distinct artistic languages and sensibilities. Though rooted in different geographies, generations, and visual vocabularies, these practices converge around a shared refusal of simplification. Masculinity here is not treated as a stable category, but as a site of tension, projection, memory, restraint, desire, and transformation.

The exhibition takes portraiture and figuration as important points of departure, yet it does not reduce the male figure to visibility alone. What emerges across the works is a more layered field of inquiry: how men are seen, how they are shaped by social expectation, how they inhabit vulnerability, and how identity may be negotiated beyond inherited codes of strength and control. In some works, the figure appears in stillness, absorbed in introspection; in others, masculinity is staged as assertion, fragility, resistance, or quiet ambiguity.

Presented during Pride Month, ECCE UOMO takes on a particular resonance. Rather than instrumentalising the moment, the exhibition approaches it as a context in which questions of gendered identity, embodiment, and representation acquire renewed clarity. The works on view do not offer a singular ideological statement; instead, they create a space in which masculinity can be re-read through subtlety, complexity, and difference. What is at stake is less the affirmation of one model than the opening of many possible readings.

At the centre of the exhibition lies the figure of the man – not as monument, but as unstable image; not as certainty, but as becoming. Through painting, photography, and mixed media, the artists gathered in ECCE UOMO invite viewers to consider masculinity beyond stereotype or closure, and to encounter it instead as a field of emotional, political, and visual construction.

With ECCE UOMO, OOA Gallery continues its commitment to presenting contemporary African and diasporic practices through curatorial propositions that are both visually compelling and intellectually attentive. In this exhibition, masculinity is neither resolved nor fixed. It is observed, unsettled, and reimagined.

Further Reading

For readers interested in broader questions surrounding gender and representation in contemporary African art, see:
African Art and Gender: Challenging Stereotypes and Redefining Expression — MOMAA

Several artists featured in ECCE UOMO engage with portraiture not simply as representation, but as a space in which identity, presence, vulnerability, and self-fashioning are negotiated. These questions are explored further in OOA Gallery’s editorial essay: Beyond Representation: Portraiture, Presence and Self-Definition in Contemporary African Art .

Exhibition Details

• Dates: June 6 – July 19, 2026
• Location: OOA Gallery, Sitges (near Barcelona), Spain
• Inquiries: Prices & availability on request