Yusuf Grillo

Biography

The blue in Yusuf Grillo’s paintings is compared to Nigerian adire textiles, colored by resist dyeing, and his combination of blue and violet to stained glass; the ample folds of Yoruba dress turn in his hands into carefully balanced geometric forms. I think the comparison with stained glass is the more accurate one. He did in fact make stained glass: on commission he created stained-glass windows and mosaics for churches, universities, government buildings and Murtala Muhammed International Airport.

He painted slowly: he could spend months, even years, on a single picture, and he was not a prolific artist.

Yusuf Adebayo Cameron Grillo was born in 1934 (by some accounts, on 16 December) in Lagos, in the Brazilian Quarter on Lagos Island, which had historically been Christianized by people from Brazil. He studied at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in Zaria and received there a diploma in fine arts and a diploma in education.

In Zaria in 1958 students founded an art society, which came to be nicknamed the “Zaria Rebels”, and Grillo was among the founders. These were the last years before the country’s independence, and the rise of national feeling was mixed with anxiety: Western culture was pushing aside local traditions, and the young artists feared they would vanish altogether. They found their footing in Uche Okeke’s theory of “natural synthesis”, according to which the art of the Indigenous peoples should be joined with what was useful in Western art, to find a language common to all. Grillo combined his Western academic training with features of traditional Yoruba sculpture. His figures are elongated, slender and graceful; in this appearance, according to the authors of his monograph, Chike Dike and P. Oyelola, he saw the contemporary ideal of urban beauty. The heads sometimes refer directly to African masks. Many of his figures are stylized almost to the point of abstraction, yet they keep their humanity. He took his subjects from local life, from people’s everyday occupations, above all in the Yoruba world.

He began teaching in 1962 at the Yaba Technical Institute, where the art department was then headed by Paul Mount. In 1966 he went to study at the University of Cambridge, in London he learned to use polyester resin for sculpture, in 1969 he visited the United States, and three years later he won a Pan-African painting competition in London; after that he studied methods of industrial training in West Germany and Britain. On his return he headed the Department of Art and Printing at Yaba College of Technology, directed its School of Art until 1985, and by the time he left in 1987 had trained several generations of Nigerian artists.

Recognition came to him in the 1960s and 1970s, when he showed a large collection of his early works; he exhibited in Africa, Europe, America and Australia. He was the first president of the Society of Nigerian Artists, in 1977 he chaired the visual arts committee of FESTAC, the Festival of Black Arts and Culture in Lagos, around 1980 he headed the Lagos State Council for Arts and Culture, and he was vice-president of the International Association of Art.

After leaving the college Grillo worked solely in his studio in Ikeja, Lagos, and taught young artists. Among his best-known works are “Drummers Return”, shown at the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art, the Sultan Bello mural, “Mother and Child” and “Moslem Woman”. In 2006 the monograph “Master of Masters” was published, and in 2018 a retrospective of his work was held.

Yusuf Grillo died on 23 August 2021 in Lagos, at the age of eighty-six.