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Igbobinna Eze: An Artist Staying True to His Spirit

Igbobinna Eze: An Artist Staying True to His Spirit

Igbobinna Eze

“I’m going deep down and finding myself, which I think is what all artists should be doing”. – Igbobinna Eze.

By Onyekachi Iloh

The Obiora Udechukwu Art Gallery shares a building with the textile section of the Nsukka Art School and adjoins the old university library. It was an exhibition held in this gallery that facilitated my first encounter with Igbobinna Eze’s work. 

I had come across the event flier on an acquaintance’s WhatsApp status and subsequently attended it. On the opening day of the exhibition, the gallery teemed with guests, majority of whom were students of the Nsukka Art School. 

The exhibition featured a duo of artists, with each taking a length of the oblong gallery, and was appropriately titled Garlands 1 & 2.  Their works ranged on either side of the wall in what might from afar seem like an adversarial encounter, but on closer examination, the subtle telegraphy between the oeuvres, a communication of consciousness as it were, was almost detectable above the heads of patrons. 

I had not been in for five minutes when a friend called to ask of my whereabouts, and I told him: I am attending an exhibition at Obiora Udechukwu Art Gallery. 

This was a place I had never been to nor heard of, but the sentence rolled off my tongue with an almost practiced ease, as if those words, in that order, were the most appropriate thing to say, a linguistic manifestation of the most appropriate concept to exist. That might be true.

One simply cannot attempt a comprehensive history of the Nsukka Art School without mentioning Obiora Udechukwu, who was, in 1972 and 1977 respectively, awarded Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the institution. 

‘Nsukka Art School’ is the moniker of the Department of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Nigeria, situated in the idyllic town of Nsukka, some sixty kilometres from the metropolitan capital city of Enugu. 

The department has from its origins touted association with a constellation of remarkable personalities; it was first established at the behest of Nnamdi Azikiwe by Ben Enwonwu—after whom it was briefly named the Enwonwu College of Art—and has since boasted of talent such as Chike Aniakor, El Anatsui, Olu Oguibe, and the famed Uche Okeke. 

Okeke, who was the pioneer head of the department, sought to blend Western art styles with the traditional Igbo grammar of visual expression, an alloy he termed ‘Natural Synthesis’, which became a source of great influence to succeeding generations of Nigerian artists and formed one of the guiding philosophies of the Nsukka Art School.

Whilst furthering his academic career, Udechukwu continued exploring Uli, traditional Igbo linear art, in the making of his own work, just as his teacher, Uche Okeke, had proffered in his philosophy of Natural Synthesis. 

Soon enough, he became a professor of painting and drawing, and shortly after, the head of the department. It was during this period he mentored artists such as Tayo Adenaike, Ozioma Onuzuluike, Marcia Kure, Ndidi Dike, and renowned art historian, Chika Okeke-Agulu. 

This sort of knowledge steels one against surprise, against astonishment, that the art gallery of the Nsukka Art School is named after him. This, indeed, might be the most appropriate thing to exist.

Garlands 1 & 2 was the final culmination of the Gerald Chukwuma Prize for a Burgeoning Creative Painter, a prize awarded to the two best student artists from the previous year and the current one respectively. Igbobinna Eze was one of those artists; having been awarded the 2023 prize, his work appeared in the exhibition alongside Elijah Godfred, winner of the 2022 prize. 

Igbobinna Eze
Igbobinna Eze (photographed by Onyekachi Iloh)

Dressed in a white puff-sleeved shirt and an oxblood sash, Eze weaved his way through patrons, stopping by to chat with this person and to take pictures with that person, his works becoming blurred portals in the background. 

He seemed stressed, but his enthusiasm, measured and guarded, was proof of his willingness to be there. The then twenty-three-year-old artist moved with audacious grace, radiating the confidence of one aware he was made to shine. But before I met the man, I was enamoured by his brushstrokes. 

Igbobinna, otherwise known as Obinna, did not always want to study Fine and Applied Arts, though he knew he had a natural proclivity for drawing and that he did it quite well. 

One of his core childhood memories was an attempt to draw a bottle in nursery three, and it was in that  moment, struggling to translate the image in his head onto paper, that something was subconsciously awakened in him—the realisation that he needed to put as much effort in drawing as he put in Mathematics and English Language. That was it for the earlier part of the story. 

In secondary school, when he had to choose a course to study in the university, art was not something he thought he could do, because “before the internet became something very serious around here, most of the artists you saw were not successful and your parents had the fear of you ending up the same should you choose that path.” 

Eventually, his decision to study art was made when a lecturer from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, teaching at the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, came to his secondary school to speak to the students about art during a career week. 

Though he was fraught with doubt, his resolve was firm; he had reached a turning point, an epiphany of sorts, and thus did he pivot from a prospective career in Computer Science to one in Fine and Applied Arts. 

Igbobinna Eze
Igbobinna Eze

Those years of doubt and indecision have now receded into the haze of time, and the artist we have come to fete is not the preteen one whose brush hand wavered with nervousness, but one whose strokes spoke and our hearts and eyes listened. 

The gallery, despite the garish patina of lights and spruced up patrons, could not hide its garb of abandon and disrepair. At the entrance were old sculptures and mannequins donning forgotten textile pieces, and stepping beyond that was like transcending the ordinary into the ethereal. 

One is reminded of Chike Aniakor’s view of art as “the wandering of [the] human spirit from one level of experience to another.” On the wall to the left, just after the blandness without is Nwa Afo, which at first hits the viewer as a swirl of red, yellow, and purple, and then reveals itself as a child nestled within what one could safely assume is the womb. 

Nwa Afo, Igbobinna Eze
Nwa Afo [Oil on Canvas, 2ft x 3ft]

The painting, done in oil on canvas, and measuring 2 by 3 feet, is of a subject which lives up to its title. Nwa Afo directly translates from Igbo into the English as a ‘child of the stomach’ or ‘child in the stomach’ and with a reasonable stretch of the metaphor, one arrives at ‘the child within,’ and should one decide to go even further, ‘the child coming.’ 

Close to the edge of the frame is an adult face, which in one interpretation could be a mother and in another be the adult holding close and nurturing the child she was once.

The Child is a recurrent motif in Igbobinna Eze’s work, both in his paintings and in his drawings. THIS IS THE EPIPHANY! (watercolour and ink on paper, 2024), Nwauli Eclosion (oil on canvas, 2024), and Krown (watercolour and ink on paper, 2024) are just a few of the works in which the presence and essence of the Child are felt. 

In January 2025, he released a series of collectible masks titled Iru Nwa, which means ‘The Child’s Face’ or ‘The Face of the Child’. The masks, which bear uniform pleased and childlike expressions are iterated and personalised by having their lips painted in varying manifestations of a whimsical disposition. 

They are all the same, yet different. The masks, in the manner of Igbobinna Eze’s paintings, bear from afar a homogeneity which dissipates upon intimate acquaintance, acquaintance which imbues the work with more mystery than the viewer is able to manage.

From works like Akachi and Akaraka Chi m nyere m—both done in brush-pen on manilla paper—one might get a sense of incompleteness as the minimalist approach to composition has the subjects sitting smack drab in the middle of the frame and swimming in a sea of negative space. But there is a sense of cohesion and accomplishment as well when one looks closer; the harmony of the curves, their gentle meandering, away from and towards each other. 

Igbobinna Eze
Akachi

“I can’t really say I know when a work is finished”, he said when I asked him how he knew if a work was completed, “but it gets to that stage when the work is like Yes, I’m here and whatever you add thereafter is just to beautify it. But I think a work gets to a point where it tells you without actually saying anything…and sometimes, when you try to go beyond that, you end up spoiling it. I think that is when you should stop, the work tells you to stop. I’m here, I’m done, this is it.

When we first met at Garlands in 2023, Igbobinna Eze’s exhibited works were either in oil or brush-pen, but he has since then left surer ground—he majored in painting—to explore and experiment while maintaining his thematic and symbolic preoccupations

Aside from the Iru Nwa masks, he has taken the motif of the Child further into jewellery, by making Iyinwa, a pendant consisting of the traditional red cap, and the Uli motifs for the eye, the heart, and the hand. 

Designed by him and fashioned by JK Meoli Crafts out of coconut shells, the piece reiterates his preoccupation with the Child, which for him is the personification of the unblemished innocence needed to be a true human spirit and a true artist. One suspects it is in this spiritual state of surrender to Muse he wishes to be in and make his work from. 

In Body of Nwa (oil on canvas, 2023), two adult hands dominate the frame, nurturing a little orange glow from which there is a flow of disparate but harmonious elements. Above the arrestive potpourri of colour and Uli motifs is a child’s face, the arms stretched out, almost as if throwing the torso open for one to see the wonder within. 

At this point, it is revealed that everything within the frame happens within the Child, and the adult hands can be interpreted as the dexterous workings of a spirit manifesting with a strength borne of surrender and true innocence. From the centre outwards, Eze leads the eye.

Uli is notably the representation of elements and ideas in a simplistic and almost minimalistic, curvilinear way. Not given to much talking, Uli serves his purpose in this way, its sparse but loaded symbolism aiding the transmission of his insight in the most poetic and euphonic way possible. 

Rhythm and music are important to Igbobinna Eze’s workflow. He likes things going smoothly the way they should go, almost like music, which is how he translates whatever he is working on, whether in oils or acrylics or something else. 

He just wants it to flow and believes that “anybody who sees the work would actually feel that flow if they’re being present, they would feel the rhythm in the work and experience a calming effect. I also want people to think. Most of my works are deep. We live in noise world where people rarely have time for themselves, and I want them to calm down and think. Sometimes the themes are profound and a high level of thinking is required to parse the message. So, thinkers are always welcome in my work. I want people to think differently, and that comes with the melody and music that the work brings.”

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Eze, who frequently shares his work on Instagram to almost four thousand followers, captions his paintings with his own original poetry and occasionally adds to his stories poems by Christopher Okigbo, who is another figure intertwined with the histories of Nsukka and the university. 

In a conversation had via WhatsApp, I asked him what Okigbo’s poetry meant to him and what poetry in general meant to him; for him, “[Uli] is hinged upon minimalism and so many summary-like concepts, just the way a poem is a concise way of saying things, quite unlike prose. Uli is a summary of the things we see around us and there is a musical quality to it, just like poems and rhymes and other figures of speech. Anybody who is deeply into Uli must, must, have one or two things to do with poetry. Okigbo is someone I’m really interested in this time, studying his poems closely. I might need so much time to understand them, to break them down, because he was almost writing in ciphers.”

One again sees the childlike stance of surrender here in wanting to decode Okigbo, in wanting to access his vault of poetic insight, not quite unlike the way Okigbo himself takes the austere stance of a penitent in his poem, ‘Heavensgate. 

He is leaning on an oilbean/lost in your legend. Okigbo, like Igbobinna Eze, is lost in the mysteries, and like Eze, he takes on the unassuming spirit of the Child and cries out for his Mother Idoto, in whose legend, in whose ciphers, in whose watery presence he swims towards meaning.

Long before Eze became a dream hurtling towards earthly manifestation, Obiora Udechukwu, his predecessor in the Uli tradition, had been enamoured with Okigbo’s work. Udechukwu, who served in the Biafran propaganda unit and possibly the military, might have known Okigbo before the latter’s untimely demise. 

Udechukwu’s artistic practice during and after the war is notably influenced by the poetry of Christopher Okigbo. His painting, Silent Faces at the Crossroads, made in 1967 at the onset of the Civil War, takes its title from Okigbo’s ‘The Passage, the poem which opens his collection, Labyrinths. 

Going further in his ekphrastic exercise, his 1976 painting, The Moon Has Ascended Between Us, riffs on Okigbo’s poem, “Love Apart”. In the poem, the moon illuminates two pines that almost touch each other, and Udechukwu aptly recognises the metaphor for what it is—an elegy to love that never was. 

In his chromatic interpretation, two figures, one gazing at the other and the other gazing at the viewer pensively, are illuminated by the glow of a purple moon. Once again, Igbobinna Eze proves himself an artist attuned to the artistic and poetic consciousness of his forebears, whether he is aware of this or not. 

Not unlike Okigbo, tradition expressed itself greatly around Eze, both in Nsukka where he grew up, and in his village, Uhunowerre, where he hails from. Okigbo’s maternal grandfather was a priest of Idoto, the goddess of a river of the same name which flows through his village of Ojoto, and he so much believed himself to be a reincarnation of his grandfather’s soul that the goddess appears prominently in his work. 

Similarly, Eze’s maternal grandfather was an herbalist, and this is merely one of the many manifestations of Igbo culture around him. His grandparents were, in his words, “core traditionalists”.  

His was a childhood filled with masquerades and the witnessing of rituals. His saw his paternal grandfather become an Onyishi, a title reserved for the oldest man in the village, and it is these things, one discovers, that imbue him with the spiritual consciousness he carries into his work, buoying the conviction with which he carries himself, for he comes from a long line of believers. 

In speaking of how his personal background has influenced his work, he hints at the psychosocial effects of lineage on art, he feels “most of these things end up playing a role as you recover the memories of the people who came before you, and it [the art] becomes a natural thing for you to do, if you plug into that path, which is what happened to me. 

It’s not that difficult for me to express these things because it’s something my people had a knack for, and that has helped me channel my art towards anything indigenous or cultural, and my background has made sure I’m able to do that effectively.”

Apart from being used as female body decoration, Uli was also used extensively for murals. Pre-colonial Igbo societies used the curvilinear art form to decorate the walls of shrines and other sacred buildings. 

In a nod to this rich history, Eze made LETTER TO SELF (2025), an art installation comprising of scrolls laden with Uli and Nsibidi motifs, the Iyinwa pendants dangling from the Iru Nwa masks, and akika aja of royal blue (akika aja being the Igbo phrase for describing mural painting). 

LETTER TO SELF, Igbobinna Eze
LETTER TO SELF [installation, 2025]

There is a clear exploration of Uli in any medium possible—the masks, the jewellery, the brush pen work, and the oil paintings—just as Uli itself was an abstracted microcosm of the real world of the pre-colonial Igbo, heavily manifested on the bodies of women, walls, carved doors, earthenware, and in the collective cultural consciousness.

When I asked if there were any new mediums he would be excited to explore in the coming years, say film, given he has been posting a lot of video content on his Instagram lately, he implied a willingness to explore whatever mediums and techniques amplify his message accurately:

“I’m being as natural as I can be, and this is the period to find myself. I just came out of school—2023-–and I think I need to spend more time with myself and speak naturally the way I should, not because someone wants me to talk like this or make art like this. 

I’m going deep down and finding myself, which I think is what all artists should be doing. My work might change eventually due to growth, but at its core you will always see the things I spoke about earlier—music, rhythm, and deep thinking. I think these are things I wouldn’t want to lose in my work.”

Onyekachi Iloh is a writer, poet and visual artist exploring photography as a means of documentation and the re-examination of sight. He is a winner of the Quarterly West Prize from Quarterly West at the University of Utah, and the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Prize from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Oxford Brookes University. In 2023, he was a selected fellow for the Oxbelly Writers’ Retreat at Costa Navarino, Greece, under the directorship of Chigozie Obioma. He is also a winner of the Sony World Photography Awards 2024. He has been part of group exhibitions in London, Aba, and Berlin.

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