Printmaker and painter · Nigeria
Bruce Onobrakpeya
Bruce Onobrakpeya (born 1932) is a Nigerian printmaker, painter and sculptor, one of the founders of modern Nigerian art. A member of the Zaria Art Society, he developed his own printmaking techniques, including deep etching and the plastograph, and filled his work with the myths and motifs of his Urhobo heritage. Since the late 1990s he has run the Harmattan Workshop for artists in his home town of Agbarha-Otor.
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Bruce Onobrakpeya was born on 30 August 1932 in Agbarha-Otor, in what is now Delta State, Nigeria, into an Urhobo family; his father was a noted carver. He studied fine art at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in Zaria, where in 1958 he joined fellow students, including Uche Okeke and Demas Nwoko, in the Zaria Art Society, committed to a "natural synthesis" of Nigerian traditions and modern art.
He found his synthesis above all in printmaking. He developed his own techniques, among them deep etching, the plastograph and the plastocast, which let him build rich, textured surfaces; he also worked in linocut, woodcut, drawing, painting and sculpture. His images draw on Urhobo myths and proverbs, Christian themes and the life of Nigeria, in dense patterns of figures and signs.
In the late 1990s he began the Harmattan Workshop in Agbarha-Otor, an annual gathering where artists from across Nigeria and abroad learn, experiment and teach, organised by the Bruce Onobrakpeya Foundation; sources differ on whether the foundation dates from the early or the late 1990s.
How to look at an Onobrakpeya: look at the surface first. Because he built his own printing processes, the textures are part of the image, and a print may be raised or incised as much as inked. Then look for the figures and signs, which come from Urhobo myth and proverb. That reading is this site's own.
His honours include an Honorable Mention at the Venice Biennale, a UNESCO Living Human Treasure award in 2006 and Nigeria's National Creativity award in 2010. The Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art at Pan-Atlantic University in Lagos and Tate list his work in their collections; the National Gallery of Modern Art in Lagos has shown his abstract canvases. Ask each which works are on display. See also Uche Okeke and our lists of Nigerian artists and Nigerian painters.
