Artist profile

Amara Okwuosa

b. 1986

Amara Okwuosa (b. 1986, Lagos) lives and works between Lagos and London. Trained at the Yaba College of Technology and the Royal College of Art (MA Painting, 2013), Okwuosa builds her paintings in successive layers of oil and pigmented beeswax, then planes them back with heated blades to expose strata of colour and incident. Her work translates the colour-fields and earth-textures of the Niger Delta into near-architectural surfaces, while drawing on family archives from her grandmother's textile workshop in Aba. Solo exhibitions include "After Rain" (Tiwani Contemporary, London, 2023) and "Soft Architectures" (SMO Contemporary, Lagos, 2021). She was shortlisted for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2014 and is represented in the collections of Tate (London) and the Zeitz MOCAA (Cape Town).