Bruce Onobrakpeya

Biography

In 1967 hydrochloric acid ate into a zinc plate in Bruce Onobrakpeya’s studio deeper than he had intended. He called the incident the “hydrochloric acid accident”, began printing the resulting deep relief as an intaglio and gave the technique the name “plastograph”. A year earlier he had already devised the “bronzed lino relief”: used linoleum blocks assembled into a collage and covered with a bronze patina, so as not to throw away plates in which he saw sculpture.

That became a habit: throw nothing away, and make a method out of the damage.

He was born on 30 August 1932 in Agbarha-Otor (now in Delta State, in southern Nigeria), the son of an Urhobo carver; he was brought up a Christian but also learned the traditional beliefs. When he was a child the family moved to Benin City. At Western Boys High School his art teacher was Edward Ivehivboje, and he also attended drawing classes at the British Council Art Club; what affected him most were the watercolours of Emmanuel Erabor and a lecture by Ben Enwonwu, art adviser to the Nigerian government. After school Onobrakpeya taught art at the same school for three years (1953–1956), then for a year at the boys’ high school in Ondo. In October 1957 he was admitted on a federal scholarship to the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in Zaria (now Ahmadu Bello University), where the Western representational tradition was taught. On 9 October 1958 students led by Uche Okeke founded the Zaria Arts Society, later nicknamed the Zaria Rebels, with the aim of “decolonizing” the art that Europeans taught there. Onobrakpeya himself has said that the college taught him the craft, while the society made him an artist: it gave him the nerve to elongate his figures, ignore perspective and let the supernatural into the picture. His first solo exhibition was held in 1959 in Ughelli, in the Niger Delta. He calls his early work “mythical realism”: paintings and linocuts on folklore subjects and the northern landscapes around Zaria, “Awhaire and the Bird”, “Zaria Indigo”.

Then came printmaking workshops in Ibadan, Oshogbo, Ife and at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine, and exhibitions in the United States, Italy, Zimbabwe, Germany, Britain and Kenya. For many years he taught at St Gregory’s College in Lagos. He divides his periods himself: the “sunshine” years of 1962–1967, with bronzed lino reliefs and silkscreens (“Leopard in a Cornfield”); “The Mask and the Cross”, 1967–1978, when the Church commissioned Christian subjects from him, from “Nativity II” to a portrait of Pope John Paul in metal foil; “Symbols of Ancestral Groves”, 1978–1984, with rulers of the Benin Kingdom; the “Sahelian Masquerades” of 1984–1988, about desertification; a mask series of 1990–1995; “Social Unrest”, 1995–1999, with large paintings on military rule and the murder of the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa; and, from 1995, installations made of discarded materials, such as “Animals of Eve” and “New City III”. Between 1978 and 1986 he developed Ibiebe, a script of his own made of geometric and curvilinear signs, which grew out of Urhobo symbols and proverbs and out of his interest in Chinese, Japanese and Ghanaian calligraphy; the signs serve for painting and for relief alike.

To the plastograph he added the plastocast, a painted low relief cast in resin from a plaster mould taken from old plates; deep etching in aluminium foil, which he worked out from experiments in the 1980s; and “ivorex”, a polymer that imitates old ivory carving. To my mind the logic here matters more than the names: every used plate gets a second life with him.

In 1999 he set up the Bruce Onobrakpeya Foundation and has since gathered artists in Agbarha-Otor every year for the Harmattan Workshop. His work has been shown at Tate Modern, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art and in Malmö; it is held by the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Vatican Museums and the National Gallery of Modern Art in Lagos. In 1989 the University of Ibadan conferred an honorary doctorate of letters on him; there is also an honourable mention from the Venice Biennale and a Fulbright scholarship. In the spring of 2023 the High Museum of Art in Atlanta showed the exhibition “The Mask and the Cross”, and in 2024 he received the U.S. Exchange Alumni Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to cultural ties between the United States and Nigeria. He illustrated books by Chinua Achebe and Cyprian Ekwensi and the English edition of Fagunwa’s “Forest of a Thousand Daemons”; in 2009 the Harmattan Workshop got a documentary of its own, which he directed himself.