Ken Nwadiogbu

Biography

“What if Black were the brightest thing in the room?” This is the question with which Ken Nwadiogbu explains a series of paintings in which Black people are painted in a dense yellow and stand at the centre of the canvas like a source of light. His 2025 exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery in London had an equally direct title: “Yellow is the New Black”.

His full name is Kenechukwu Emmanuel Nwadiogbu, and he signed his early work with the pseudonym KenArt. He was born in 1994 in Lagos and went to the University of Lagos, where he studied civil and environmental engineering. He began drawing as a student, on his own, without art school; friends persuaded him to keep going, and after his engineering degree he turned to art entirely. At the very start of his career he made album artwork for the musician Burna Boy.

His first serious works were hyperrealistic drawings in pencil, charcoal and acrylic: “The King’s Diary”, the series “The Value of Nothing”, “Packages in Brown Skin”. A frequent motif of those years is an ordinary person peering out through torn paper. In a work made in response to the #MeToo movement, two girls are wrapped in nylon sheeting; one has slumped and given in, the other is angry and straining to break out. In 2016 Nwadiogbu took part in the exhibition “Insanity” at Omenka Gallery in Lagos alongside Arinze Stanley and Ayo Filade, and that same year he co-founded Artists Connect Africa, a network that helps young African artists find one another and places to show. Then came the fairs Art X Lagos and Moniker in Brooklyn. In 2019 he won The Future Awards Africa prize for art and had his first solo exhibition abroad, at the Brick Lane Gallery in London. It was called “Contemporealism”. With this word Nwadiogbu named his idea that even the most exact copy of a moment is not the moment itself, and that hyperrealism needs help from the other means of contemporary art to convey the mood and feeling of lived experience.

In 2020–2021 his work appeared at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in New York, at the 1-54 fair in New York, in Yinka Shonibare’s studio in London, at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu and in the exhibition of the Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Prize in Coventry Cathedral. The Los Angeles gallery Thinkspace Projects gave him a solo show, “UBUNTU”.

The installation “Journey Mercies” (2021), shown at the Bomb Factory Art Foundation in London, consisted of painted cardboard boxes: with them the artist represented the bodies of migrants carried across oceans, taking the colouring from traditional African woven fabrics. The title refers to the Nigerian custom of praying for someone about to set out on a long journey. In 2022 it was shown again at Retro Africa gallery in Abuja, and in 2024, as “Journey Mercies: A Migration Symphony”, at the ART SG fair in Singapore.

London was a turning point. In 2022 Nwadiogbu entered the Royal College of Art’s MA Painting programme on a full scholarship and completed it in 2023. During his studies he visited Frank Bowling’s studio, and by his own account it was this visit that led him to take up abstraction seriously. Now he first pours and drips paint over the canvas, following colour and movement, and then paints figures on top in sharp detail. The orange and yellow tones recall the image of a thermal camera: memory, he believes, lives on as energy after the picture has faded. Sometimes he paints on the reverse of Akwete cloth, a handwoven fabric from south-eastern Nigeria, and the pattern on the front remains a second, independent work.

To my mind, the method shows best in the exhibition “Fragments of Reality”, which opened on 7 October 2023 at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery by London Bridge: it was based on his own photographs of friends and acquaintances from the African diaspora in Britain, repainted in a red-orange palette. The same year his work was in the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition and at Somerset House, in the project “Portrait of a Top Boy” commissioned by Netflix. In 2024 he was one of five artists in the exhibition “Absolut Warhol: The Other Half” at the Saatchi Gallery, and in Berlin he had a solo show, “I Belong Here”.

In 2025 the Royal Society of British Artists gave him its Rising Star Award. In February 2026 Nwadiogbu won the Young Generation Art Award, established by the company Degussa together with the German magazine Monopol; the jury included Yilmaz Dziewior, director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.