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Oluwanbe Amodu (b. Lagos, Nigeria) is a Nigerian-born visual artist based in the United States. He studied at Yaba College of Technology, Lagos, and in 2007 joined the Ara Studio, where he developed and refined the Araism technique—a material-intensive, narrative-driven approach to image-making. That same year, he debuted within the Araism Movement, marking the beginning of an internationally exhibited career.

Amodu’s mixed-media practice incorporates acrylic, paper, fabric, leather, and found objects, materials chosen for their capacity to carry cultural memory and layered histories. In 2010, his work was featured in 101 Contemporary Nigerian Artists, a landmark publication by U.S.-based publisher Chukwuemeka Bosah.

A resident artist at Nine Eighteen Nine Studio Gallery in Charlotte, North Carolina, Amodu has exhibited widely across Nigeria, the United States, and the Benin Republic. In 2025, he received both Best in Show and the People’s Choice Award at the Guild of Charlotte Artists Annual Exhibition. Alongside his studio practice, he is committed to mentorship and community engagement, leading empowerment initiatives and supporting humanitarian projects through art.

ARTIST STATEMENT
My practice is deeply tactile and material-driven. Each surface serves as a site of excavation, where acrylic, paper, fabric, leather, and found objects are layered to create compositions that resonate with cultural memory and lived experience. These materials are not selected solely for their aesthetic effect, but for their symbolic capacity to hold histories, emotions, and traces of human presence.
Sourced from everyday life, the fragments I incorporate retain the imprint of touch and use. Once embedded into the work, they are transformed into narrative elements—metaphors for resilience, continuity, and transformation. Texture is essential to this process; it disrupts visual flatness and invites a multisensory encounter in which sight gives way to a heightened awareness of surface, depth, and form.
The resulting works blur the boundary between abstraction and representation, operating as tactile chronicles of African identity, spirituality, and place. Through layered surfaces and material accumulation, I seek to transform the ordinary into vessels of memory and cultural storytelling, creating works that are deeply personal yet collectively resonant.