Chiselled, burnt, pierced and nailed: in Chukwuma's panels wood becomes an archive, recording what oral tradition risks losing forever.
Gerald Chukwuma (b. 1973, Lagos, Nigeria) is a sculptor and painter whose intricately crafted wood panels have established him among the most significant Nigerian artists of his generation. Against his family's expectations he abandoned his marketing studies to enrol at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he graduated in 2003 with First Class Honours, specializing in painting. The Nsukka school, credited with expanding and modernizing the Igbo cultural aesthetic, gave him his foundational vocabulary: the Uli graphic tradition and the Nsibidi ideographic signs that continue to structure his work.
Chukwuma's panels are built through an intensely physical process of chiselling, burning, painting and piercing, onto which he nails flattened fragments of upcycled aluminium, drink cans, phone charge cards and SIM cards gathered from the streets of Lagos. The choice is both aesthetic and ethical: in a country with little recycling infrastructure, discarded materials become his palette, rooting the work in contemporary concerns about environmental change while carrying the traces of everyday Nigerian life. Uli patterns, traditionally painted on skin or on the walls of houses and destined to fade with sun and rain, are made permanent in his carved surfaces: the artist conceives his work as a form of documentation of an Igbo heritage at risk of disappearing from contemporary consciousness. Migration, voluntary and forced, runs through his imagery as a constant process of transformation, told through playfully illustrative figures moving across fields of symbols, while his textured surfaces reflect his study of international art history, from Klimt's gold detailing to Van Gogh's colour and Picasso's stylistic freedom.
A two-time top-three winner of Nigeria's National Art Competition (2008, 2011), Chukwuma was featured on CNN's Inside Africa in 2011 and reviewed in The New York Times in 2019. Solo exhibitions include "Standing Ovation" at Gallery 1957, Accra (2017), "Eclipse of the Scrolls" at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London (2021), and "Water Carried Us Here, Water Will Carry Us Away" at O'DA Art, Lagos (2025). His work has been presented at Contemporary Istanbul, 1-54 London and New York, ART X Lagos, and in group exhibitions including "Kubatana" at the Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Norway (2019), "Forward to the Past: Reengaging Uli in New Experiments" at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London (2022), and "After the Fire" at Black Liquid Art Gallery, Rome (2026), where fire itself, used to engrave memory onto wood, becomes language. His works are held in the World Bank Art Collection, Washington D.C., the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art, Lagos, the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and major private collections including the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, USA, and the Seth Dei Collection, Accra. He lives and works in Lagos.