"The hair is their symbol of identity."
Oluwole Omofemi (born Godwin Oluwole Omofemi, 2 June 1988, Ibadan, Nigeria) grew up in the Ekotedo community of Ibadan with his maternal grandfather, whose name, Adekunle, "the crown fills the family", he came to bear, after spending part of his childhood with his mother in Agenebode, Etsako, a fishing community in Edo State, his family's region of origin. The hustle of the Ibadan metropolis, and especially the popular Dugbe Market, fired his early imagination: as a boy he hawked beer to buy drawing books, was recognized among the best young artists at the Community Grammar School of Mokola, and opened a kiosk to display his miniatures. His perception of art changed forever when he met Tope Fatunbi, an artist with a small gallery and studio in Ibadan, who became his first inspiration. He earned his National Diploma (2012) and Higher National Diploma in painting (2015) at The Polytechnic, Ibadan, graduating among the best students of his year, and began his professional path in Lagos through Alexis Galleries, which championed his work from 2012.
Omofemi's strength lies in the human figure. Working in oil and acrylic, with a declared preference for oil, he portrays Black women and men whose monumental Afro hair rises like a crown against saturated, pop-inflected backgrounds. His message is a call to self-acceptance addressed to the Black community: to accept who they are, the colour of their skin and their hair, because the hair is the symbol of identity. His imagery recovers the memory of a culture interrupted by the colonial encounter, from the shea butter with which his forefathers and foremothers protected their skin to the cultural values of the Yoruba kingdom he found as a young reader in D.O. Fagunwa's "The Forest of a Thousand Daemons". His personal pantheon joins Gustav Klimt, the artist he most reveres, Leonardo's Mona Lisa, which he has reinterpreted in a dedicated series of paintings, and Picasso's maxim that everything you can imagine is real. In 2021 he established the Oluwole Omofemi Foundation, through which he supports his home community of Ekotedo.
After early exhibitions at the National Museum, Ibadan, and the Alliance Française, Ibadan, Omofemi's international career accelerated with the solo exhibitions "The Way We Are" (2020) and "In Our Days" (2021) at Signature African Art, Mayfair, London, and "Emancipation" at Out of Africa Gallery, Barcelona (2021), with further exhibitions in Belgium, Italy, France, Spain, Ghana, the United States and Nigeria, including Volta New York. In May 2022, introduced to Tatler by the rugby champion and collector Maro Itoje, he was commissioned to paint Queen Elizabeth II for the magazine's Platinum Jubilee cover: the first African artist commissioned to portray the Queen, and the author of her last commissioned portrait, in which the monarch appears with rich black hair, Omofemi's signature woven into royal iconography. The painting was exhibited in Sotheby's "Power & Image: Royal Portraiture & Iconography", London, alongside Andy Warhol's Reigning Queens and the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I. He took part in "Decameron Quarantine Art", the series of video interviews with African artists conceived by curator Antonella Pisilli for Black Liquid Art Gallery during the pandemic lockdown, available on the gallery's channels. His works have been sold at Christie's and Phillips and are widely collected in Nigeria and abroad. He lives and works in Ibadan.