Chibụike Ụzọma

b. 1992 in Port Harcourt, Nigeria
Lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut

Chibụike Ụzọma is a multidisciplinary artist working with painting, photography, drawing, text, and video. By treating art simultaneously as a subject and an object, Ụzọma’s practice engenders the painted image with the superstition of narratives and meanings, making the subject matter a performance prop and context a fluid ground. Ụzọma offers us a transversal vision of art history through the aesthetic vocabularies happening concurrently within his paintings. Considering the possibilities of images to embody a multitude of narratives and meanings, Ụzọma’s practice positions the viewer to experience the paintings as autonomous compositions that lend themselves as a site for intersecting and divergent discourses.

Chibụike Ụzọma received his BFA from the University of Benin, Nigeria and his MFA at Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT (USA), in 2021. In 2018, he was granted the Francis Greenburger Fellowship. Numerous solo exhibitions were dedicated to his works, including To Kick A Stone, at Simon Lee Gallery, London (UK) in 2023, Walk on Water, Everard Read, Cape Town (ZA) in 2019, and Nascence at Omenka Gallery, Lagos (NG) in 2015. His works have been included in many other exhibitions, such as Retinal Hysteria, curated by Robert Storr, Venus Over Manhattan, New York (USA) in 2023, Convergent Evolutions: The Conscious of Body Work, Pace, New York (USA), In Praise of Shadows, Lyles & King, New York (USA), both in 2021, Contemporary Performance, Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, Florida, (USA), in 2019, and Time Has Gone, Lagos Photo Festival, Lagos (NG) in 2018.