Buildings remember the people who inhabit them: in Akpojotor's constructed figures, architecture and identity become a single, inseparable form.
Patrick Akpojotor is a Nigerian multidisciplinary artist working across painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture. He studied fine art at the School of Art and Industrial Design, Federal Polytechnic, Auchi, and at Lagos State Polytechnic, Ikorodu, complementing his formal education with an informal apprenticeship as studio assistant to Bruce Onobrakpeya, one of the founding figures of Nigerian modernism. He lives and works in Lagos.
Akpojotor's practice is rooted in his fascination with architecture, ancient African art and the built environment, and in their capacity to shape individual and collective identity. He observes how human attitudes differ according to the culture of the spaces people inhabit, and how the naming of streets, buildings and public places inscribes a person's memory into the fabric of the city. In his compositions, bodies and buildings share a single grammar: figures assembled from planes, volumes and geometric fragments inhabit spaces that exist only in the painting, unsettling the viewer's assumptions about what is solid, what is figure and what is ground. For Akpojotor, the placement of objects matters less than their representation, their insistence on being present within the image.
In 2016 Akpojotor won the inaugural Access Bank ART X Prize, awarded at ART X Lagos, West Africa's leading art fair, where he presented his work in 2017. That same year he took part in "Bruce Onobrakpeya and the Harmattan Workshop Exhibition" (2016), and in 2018 in "IN-TER-ACTIONS" at Rele Gallery, Lagos, where his installation "Developing Cities", a group of towering abstract sculptures built from salvaged industrial and technological refuse, from plumbing components to automotive scrap, reflected on the chaotic verticality of a city in permanent construction. He held the solo exhibition "To See the World" at Allouche Gallery, New York. In 2024 he participated in the group exhibition "Mapping Structures: Across Worlds" at Rele, Los Angeles, alongside Paul Onditi and Soo Kim. In 2026 Rele, Lagos, presented "Woven and Built: In Tandem", a two-person exhibition in which his work entered into dialogue with that of Marcellina Oseghale Akpojotor, celebrating a decade of parallel artistic paths lived side by side.