Complexity - The Weganda Review

One afternoon at his house, in which a small room is the studio where he paints, Godfrey Banadda pointed to a print of Venus, an oil painting he made in 2011 and which is now the property of a European collector. The painting is as complex as anything Banadda has ever made, and there, in his living room, it was a struggle to keep up with the artist as he articulated what this icon meant and that symbol represented.

Venus, among the most significant works in his oeuvre, had been inspired by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, and in the artwork Banadda had tried, with brush and canvas, to represent the maddening search for the Holy Grail. Banadda is the rare artist who could speak eloquently about his work, one reason he never leaves a canvas untitled. He can explain everything – his vision, his intention, his technique, his color choices – with such élan that one, listening to the artist speak, is compelled to pay attention.

Banadda told TWR that he tries to explain phenomena first by observing and then scrutinizing and drawing conclusions as he transports his ideas onto canvas. As an image-maker, as an artist who grapples with the tension between surface and depth, Banadda is nearly peerless in these parts. His work, with its labyrinthine complexity and allusions to the mysteries of human nature, is widely recognized among connoisseurs, collectors, gallerists, and others. “If I abstract content, although I have used realistic images, I will capture the abstractionist,” he told TWR. “Because I will also be managing his natural way of looking at things and the abstract part of not knowing what I’ve done. He needs to struggle to find out what I’ve done.”

TWR is publishing the images of only 12 paintings from Banadda’s wide body of work going back to the 1990s. This portfolio features new and old pieces, and some of the paintings were recently exhibited in a show at Kampala’s Umoja Art Gallery. They are all painted in the unique Surrealist style Banadda developed while he was a student at Makerere University in the early 1980s. As he tells it, his style emerged from a desire to impress two of his university lecturers – one a realist and the other an abstractionist – and he had come into his own as a painter by the time he graduated with first-class honors in 1984. He told TWR that, from the beginning, his style aimed “to bridge two minds, without even knowing that there was a style called Surrealism.”

Banadda, who was born in 1958, earned a post-graduate diploma in art education from Makerere University in 1985, the same year he started work as the culture officer for the eastern Ugandan district of Iganga. The boring work there failed to challenge him, and in 1992 he returned to Makerere University to earn his master’s degree in art, focusing on painting. He was appointed an assistant lecturer in the art school’s painting department in 1995, then a lecturer in 1997, in a career that was distinguished not just by the painting prizes he won but also by the high regard in which his university colleagues held him. Two years after Banadda retired from Makerere University in 2018, he became a part-time lecturer in painting, graphic design and visual communication at Uganda Christian University.

Banadda, like many other artist-scholars, has suffered relative obscurity despite his undisputed status as a painter of museum-quality works. Before the Umoja Art Gallery show earlier in 2024, Banadda’s last major exhibition had been a show of African art in Denmark in 2015. The works in this portfolio, curated with the artist’s approval, are Banadda as we know him: provocative, philosophical, vigilant, complicated, and technically brilliant. They are Banaddas in every way.

One painting we especially like is titled Feeling Horny, a piece so startling that it can seem senseless to try to interrogate it. Look at how he paints the woman’s locks of hair as if they were the horns of a beast. Banadda said of this painting that he was actually trying to examine the subject of human desire as it expresses “the hidden image in you.” In other words, according to him, what could it possibly mean visually if someone, like the beastly woman in this painting, is said to be horny?

We hope that more Africans will discover the work of this Ugandan master. In the village of Kikaaya, not far from the spot where Mityana Road merges into the Kampala Northern Bypass, Banadda paints almost every day. Many of his works remain unsold, partly because it can be hard to make him part with his paintings. A full essay on Banadda’s legacy is forthcoming in TWR, which considers him a historically important artist for Uganda and the wider region. ▪