Bruce Onobrakpeya (Nigerian, 1932- )
Urhapele
deep color etching, pencil signed and dated 1975 l.r., 7/9
image measures approximately: 19 3/8" W x 26 1/2" H
sheet measures approximately: 22 3/8" W x 30 1/2" H
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About Bruce Onobrakpeya
Bruce Onobrakpeya led a Nigerian artistic movement grounded in African aesthetic traditions. His work has been exhibited at Tate Modern and the 1990 Venice Biennale, and he received a lifetime achievement award from the National Museum of African Art in 2013.
Onobrakpeya creates high-relief prints as well as bronzes, drawings, paintings, and installations influenced by West African decorative arts, philosophy, and history. As a student at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology Onobrakpeya co-founded the Zaria Art Society, a group dedicated to developing a style of postcolonial Nigerian art that embraced Pan-African folklore, motifs, and iconography. Later called the Zaria Rebels, these artists showcased Nigeria’s rich cultural traditions and challenged the prevailing notion of European supremacy in the arts.
Onobrakpeya was born in the oil-rich Niger Delta in 1932. Onobrakpeya’s father was a carver in Agbara Otor; his mother, a keen collector of local craft and beads. This gave the young Onobrakpeya an early familiarity with art. By his secondary school in Benin City, his ability in art had become apparent and he was urged to remain after graduation to become an art instructor.
After teaching for a few years, Onobrakpeya relocated to Ondo, and did the same job in 1956 at Ondo Boys High School. By October 1957, he was a student at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology. Through the funds of a government-sponsored scholarship, he was trained in the Western tradition of representational art.
In 1964 he attended Oshogbo workshops in etching and was greatly influenced by the artists he met. The same year he became a founding member of the Society of Nigerian Artists.
An innovator and experimentalist in printmaking, Onobrakpeya developed many techniques including “bronze lino relief,” “hydrochloric acid accident,” and in 1967, a deep etching technique called “plastograph” that uses plates cast in plaster. In a continuous process of innovation, Bruce started making prints from these “plastercasts,” then coated the original plates with bronze in order to make the casts into pieces of art work themselves. In later years, Onobrakpeya recast these original plates into columns of resin to create sculptural installation-shrines, thereby not only reinventing the idea of printing itself, but reinterpreting African shrine traditions to give these ritual places new meanings.
From the 1970s until the 1990s, Onobrakpeya was an artist-in-residence and professor at numerous institutions in the United States, Nigeria and Zimbabwe. In 1999 he founded the Bruce Onobrakpeya Foundation which encourages creative interaction among artists and scholars and aims to increase public awareness of African art.
Onobrakpeya has exhibited at the Tate Modern, National Museum of African Art of the Smithsonian Institution, High Museum of Art, and the Malmö Konsthall. In Nigeria, his work hangs in The National Gallery of Modern Art, Lagos.
Onobrakpeya was jointly designated by UNESCO and the Federal government of the Republic of Nigeria with the honor of “LIVING HUMAN TREASURE” a befitting tribute to a man whose whole life has been ruled by one passion: The celebration of the arts, and by extension our humanity as a people.