Obiora Udechukwu

Biography

In the painting “Silent Faces at the Crossroads” (1967) a great crowd of half-clothed people moves forward, wrapped in blue cloths with flecks of white. The rear ranks darken and almost merge into a silhouette. The faces are sketched in, but they have no eyes. Along the left edge the ground glows red, and along this red strip walks a single small, almost childlike figure. The painting is seen as the flight of the Igbo from northern Nigeria after the pogroms, and the artist himself had fled from there at the time.

That same year civil war broke out in Nigeria.

He was born in 1946 in Onitsha, and his family came from Agulu in the south-east of the country. It was there, on the walls of family compounds and shrines, that he first saw uli murals. He received his primary and secondary education in an English-language colonial school system, where drawing was also taught. He studied for a year at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, but because of the pogroms against the Igbo in the north he transferred to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. During the war of 1967–1970 he worked in the Biafran propaganda unit and took part in the writers’ and artists’ workshops led by the poet Gabriel Okara and the artist Uche Okeke. After the war he returned to Nsukka, in 1972 completed his bachelor’s thesis on uli murals, in 1973 became a junior fellow of the Department of Fine Arts, and in 1977 took his master’s degree.

From 1970 the art department at Nsukka was headed by Uche Okeke, the author of the theory of “Natural Synthesis”: the art of the new, independent Nigeria should combine local traditions with Western ones. For Okeke the main material was uli, the wall and body painting done by Igbo women, with its flowing curves and lively linear design. From the mid-1970s Udechukwu spent more than ten years studying uli and carrying it over into painting and drawing, and at the end of the decade he added nsibidi, a system of signs that came to the Igbo from the Ejagham people. Nsibidi is linked with the Ekpe men’s secret societies and can be used to send messages, and in Udechukwu’s work it appears, for example, in “People of the Night” and “Ndidi: The Patient Person” (both 1985). His line is fine and lyrical, and his colour rests on the primaries: red, blue, yellow, sometimes orange. This is how “Musician” (1975–1976), “The Moon Has Ascended Between Us” (1976), “Refugees” (1977), “No Water” (1980) and “Song of Sorrow” (1989) are painted. In “Road to Abuja” (1982) rich and poor make their way to the future capital, which was only then beginning to be moved from Lagos: in front are people with watches and briefcases, signs of wealth and of bribery too, and behind them a crowd of street vendors. To my mind, his subject can be seen best of all right here: ordinary people and those who have power over them, drawn with one and the same line.

He became one of the founders of the Aka Circle of Exhibiting Artists, which included El Anatsui, Tayo Adenaike and other artists of eastern Nigeria, sat on the editorial board of the literary journal Okike, founded at Nsukka by Chinua Achebe, and in 1986 became Professor of Painting. His students included Tayo Adenaike, Olu Oguibe, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Marcia Kure and Sylvester Ogbechie.

In 1997 he was invited to St. Lawrence University in New York State as professor of fine arts, and taught there until his retirement in 2018. In 1999–2000 the State Museum of Ethnology in Munich mounted his retrospective “Our Great Journey”, and his large work “Our Journey” (1993) was shown in the exhibition “Nigerian Modernism” at Tate Modern in London. He has had more than twenty-five solo exhibitions, in Nigeria, England, Zimbabwe, Germany and the United States. His work is held by the National Gallery of Modern Art in Lagos, the Iwalewa-Haus of the University of Bayreuth, the Museum of Ethnology in Frankfurt, the museums of Bradford, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art and the Newark Museum of Art. His collection of poems “What the Madman Said” won the poetry prize of the Association of Nigerian Authors in 1990. In 2015 the University of Nigeria devoted a scholarly conference to him and El Anatsui, and Chika Okeke-Agulu, his former student, published a monograph on him, “Line, Image, Text”.