Ufuoma Onobrakpeya

Biography

In 2005 twelve works were selected to appear in the Guinness corporate calendar, the brewing company’s annual publication. Among them was a print by Ufuoma Onobrakpeya, “Health Care Immunization”.

He was born on 21 February 1971 in Lagos. His father, Bruce Onobrakpeya, is one of Nigeria’s best-known artists; his paternal grandfather, Obi Omonedo Onobrakpeya, was a carver, so Ufuoma is a third-generation artist in the family. As a boy and a young man he worked for two decades as an apprentice to his father.

He received his formal education at the University of Benin, graduating in 1995 with a degree in fine art, specialising in painting. Among those who influenced him in Benin he names Professor Irein Wangboje. In 2002 he obtained a master’s degree in art, specialising in printmaking, from Camberwell College of Arts, part of the University of the Arts London; his studies were funded by a scholarship from the Institute of International Education (USA). The Nigerian artist Ben Osawe had studied at the same college in the 1960s. Professor Paul Coldwell, assessing Onobrakpeya’s work from his London years, wrote that it recalled the British Pop artists who presented the image of “swinging London” in the 1960s. His exhibiting career began in the late 1990s. In 1997 the solo exhibition “My Genesis” was held at the Lekki Restaurant Gallery in Lagos, organised by Chevron Nigeria. Group shows followed: “New Trends in Nigerian Art” (1998, Texaco), an exhibition of folklore-inspired art in honour of the novelist Amos Tutuola at the National Gallery of Art in Lagos (1999), an exhibition by the Otu-Ewena group at the National Theatre complex in Iganmu (2000), and “Art and Democracy” in Asaba, Delta State (May 2004), held for the fifth anniversary of democratic rule in the state. In 2007 at the Terra Kulture centre in Lagos he showed paintings, prints and plastocasts in the exhibition “My Environment, My Culture”.

Since 1998 Onobrakpeya has been a founding member of the annual Harmattan Workshop, run by the Bruce Onobrakpeya Foundation in Agbarha-Otor, Delta State. He takes part regularly, acts as an adviser and leads sessions in printmaking. The results of the workshop were shown in 2004 in collaboration with the Pan-African University in Lagos, and in May 2012 the exhibition “Bruce Onobrakpeya and the Harmattan Experiment”, with twenty artists, among them Ufuoma, was held at the Dakar Biennale in Senegal.

His painting series “14 Stations of the Cross” (2005) is at All Saints Church in Yaba, Lagos; it is the only work known to have entered a public collection.