OGBESIA (THE MINSTREL)
inscribed 22/30 / Ogbesia (The Minstrel) / additive plastograph / Bruce Onobrakpeya / Lagos June 1988 lower margin
additive plastograph on paper
67.5 x 89.6cm; 26 1/2 x 35 1/4in
unframed

Property of a Lady, London

Provenance
Nigerian Ambassador to Switzerland
Gifted from the above to the current owner's father

Bruce Onobrakpeya is widely regarded as one of the foremost figures in modern Nigerian art and among Africa's most inventive printmakers. Born in 1932 in Agbarha-Otor, Delta State, he trained at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in Zaria, where he was a founding member of the influential Zaria Art Society, a cohort of young artists committed to forging a distinctively Nigerian aesthetic that synthesised indigenous visual traditions with international modernism. A recipient of the Nigerian National Order of Merit (NNOM), he established his celebrated annual Harmattan Workshop in Nigeria in 1998, shaping generations of Nigerian artists through a programme of creative and scholarly exchange.

The additive plastograph, the technique in which the present work is made, is among Onobrakpeya's most significant technical inventions, involving the building up of a textured relief surface on plastic using adhesives and found materials, producing prints of rich tactile depth that recall the patina of Benin bronzes and the markings of traditional woodcarving. Titled Ogbesia meaning minstrel or praise-singer, the work highlights Onobrakpeya's sustained engagement with Niger Delta cultural traditions: the minstrel as keeper of communal memory, mediator between the living and the ancestral.