At Sean Kelly, Anthony Akinbola’s Bold Exploration of Medium and Metaphor

Camouflage is recognized in science as a form of mimicry, in which an organism or object adopts the appearance of its surroundings to evade detection. It is a physical phenomenon driven by chemical processes and serves as a crucial tool for resistance and survival in both natural and human contexts. As Roger Caillois explored in Man, Play and Games (1958), camouflage can also transcend biological necessity to enter the realm of play and artistic expression. In this sense, mimicry becomes both a survival mechanism and an act of deception, visible in games and social interactions alike. Morphing into imitative play, the act of blending in or masking one’s true identity emerges as a cultural and social practice. Within this oscillation between concealment and visibility, questions arise about how identity is performed to meet societal expectations, and about the social, cultural and political implications of physical and symbolic transformation, identification and invisibility.

The theme of camouflage—treated as a physical, cultural and sociological phenomenon—has been central to Anthony Akinbola’s practice since his vibrant, durational compositions first drew attention nearly a decade ago. After a brief foray into installation and sculpture, the artist returns to this core focus in his new show at Sean Kelly. Here, he extends his exploration of camouflage through technique and material, in an approach that has become his signature, while continuing to push the limits of painting, transforming everyday substances into imaginative, evocative spaces that move beyond conventional functions and meanings.

“With this show, I wanted to explore how camouflage functions both politically and naturally,” Akinbola told Observer ahead of the opening, as he was finalizing the last works in his studio. “My original intent was to explore what the material does socially, what it means in public space and the concept of stereotype threat. I started that body of work and even named it before I really explored it, and after exploring it for the past nine years, I think I’m revisiting what that work means to me.”

For at least a decade, the durag has been a central material in Akinbola’s practice. Headwear commonly associated with African-American culture carries layers of meaning, from hair care and cultural identity to entrenched stereotypes that Akinbola has long sought to challenge. In this show, he pushes the material further, camouflaging it into landscapes like gardens or seascapes, resisting conventional readings of both the fabric and its cultural associations.

Durags themselves are cultural artifacts shaped by context, location and time. “Durag grew out of African culture, but also implies this juxtaposition—Africa and Black America—two elements that are very different, yet really the same,” Akinbola explained. “I wanted to investigate this idea of losing my identity, but also through the potential stereotyping that comes with how people perceive the durag,” he added, noting how these perceptions have long defined the starting point for his work.

“There’s something about survival in how I’m using camouflage and how I’m speaking about the durag. It’s both resistance to stereotypes and resistance to direct readings of the material. That’s why the durag can be in a garden scene, surrounded by flowers, and still speak to racism, oppression, stereotype threat and all these other things. It expands beyond both the traditional use and the conventional meaning of the material.”

Stitched and layered in complex patterns, the durag—a material dense with cultural associations—transforms into pure pigment, creating compositions that are vibrant, luminous and poetically evocative. If Akinbola’s durag paintings once spoke primarily to assimilation, stereotyping and Black identity, they now also draw on color theory and the potential of abstraction to summon entire worlds. “Color was definitely the main focus,” Akinbola confirmed, pointing to a painting titled Pink Lemonade and reflecting on how it is just a pink piece yet conjures an entire image and the sensations tied to it.

When we met Akinbola a year ago for his show at SCAD in Savannah, he told Observer that he wanted to position his work within painting because the art world remains so protective of what counts as “painting.” Challenging and expanding that definition has been a central drive in his research. “To paint, I use objects that are already a repository for cultural and social memories,” he said. At SCAD, Akinbola employed products similarly marked by African-American associations to create massive painterly arrangements that, from a distance, coalesced into abstract compositions.

Echoing Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, durags and other objects in Akinbola’s work are not merely raw materials; they carry histories, cultural associations and social meanings. Each object functions as an active node in a network linking artist and viewer. Color, texture and even the exhibition space interact with these objects, collectively shaping perception and interpretation. Through this interplay, the works move beyond the meanings embedded in individual elements, becoming signifiers of broader collective and societal expression and speaking to the African-American experience while opening onto new imaginative and allegorical realms.

In “Camouflage,” the works are less concerned with critique or pedagogy and more attuned to how color, texture and gesture generate new narratives and imaginative spaces, connected to forces larger than cultural specifics or personal histories, such as nature.

When speaking with Akinbola this time, he emphasized the transgressive act of presenting these objects as paintings—especially against the backdrop of painting’s history and exclusivity. It becomes a direct challenge to the Western, Eurocentric understanding of what painting is and what it can be, inviting viewers to look beyond those limits.

In this sense, Akinbola places himself within the lineage of artists like Robert Rauschenberg, who questioned painting’s respectability by bringing the material realities of life into the canvas and using everyday objects as mediums. “I feel like I’m working within that same heritage,” Akinbola reflected. “Painting is meant to evolve.”

The way Akinbola works with given colors feels like creating “lived” paintings, where the material comes from daily life. “These are durags, materials that people live with. I like the idea of them being paintings,” he said, “but it’s not about creating symbolic imagery, that’s not my aim, nor collage. It’s something of its own.”

Through this approach, Akinbola tests viewers’ responses to materials and their experiential potential. “I think it’s more about witnessing people’s reactions to the objects and the work. And from that, I can observe the social dynamics. Because I’m human and have a relationship with objects, that dynamic is just there.”

“I’ve been preferring to use the term representational abstraction,” he continued, explaining that for this show, he both knew certain things he wanted to render and the story he wanted to tell around camouflage, not as a conceptual idea, but as a literal history of it. “I knew I wanted to create a water scene and a garden, so I knew I’d need green for the garden, and the sun would play a role,” he said, citing one of the largest pieces in the show, which is intended to evoke the ocean. In this work, he created a gradient moving from white to black through blues to depict the sea. The piece resonates in its abstraction with Monet’s late Water Lilies, while still giving viewers a sense of recognizable reality.

“With art, we are always mimicking things that exist in nature. I’d say I’m a painter. Many people might try to say I’m not, but I’m not sure what labels even mean anymore,” he argued, noting that the creative freedom offered by camouflaging—of materials, of his own style, of his own lexicon—has released him from any pressure to label his work.

At a certain point, Akinbola admits he is no longer even thinking about race when making these paintings. “I’ve been working with durags for so long, so it has that foundation, but now it’s about color and abstraction,” he said. “It’s not about labor or the ready-made anymore; at this point, I’m focusing on painting and color.”

With this show, Akinbola deliberately seeks to free his artistic language from both the physical materials and the biased, stereotypical readings he has long faced as a Black artist in the U.S. “I want to focus on camouflage as the main theme, but I want to evolve beyond the whole stereotype threat and assimilation conversation,” he remarks.

These works should therefore be understood as both artistic and philosophical inquiries into what painting, color and objects can be, beyond the meanings conventionally tied to them. They emerge as symbols of a broader world, suggesting the possibility of an evolving artistic lexicon free from racial or cultural categorization.

“I want to address bigger concepts,” Akinbola asserted. The camouflage—whether through wearing a durag, code-switching, or treating painting in unconventional ways—is, for him, about opening new possibilities for transformation and meaning. It suggests that there are other ways to read this material world. “I also want people to acknowledge that I’m trying to paint. These aren’t just conceptual executions of showing durags in a gallery space.” For Akinbola, this is the essence of his practice: to move beyond the categorization of materials and embrace painting’s potential to open new imaginative spaces and new forms of meaning.

Anthony Akinbola’s “Camouflage” is on view at Sean Kelly New York through October 18, 2025. 

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