Osi Audu

Osi Audu was born in Nigeria in 1956 and studied at the University of Ife (Nigeria), where he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with first class honors in 1980. He went on to study at the University of Georgia in Athens (USA) and earned his Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting & Drawing in 1984. In 1994, he earned a postgraduate certificate in education from the University of Kent in Canterbury (UK).

Osi Audu maintains a visual language of geometric shapes and a palette of monochromatic blacks, whites, greys and primary colors to explore the tangible and intangible aspects of the self and self-consciousness. His techniques draw from ancient Yoruba philosophies and modern Western approaches, such as the idea that objects can contain, channel and transform natural forces. Following the Yoruba concept of Ori Inu ("the inner head"), Audu's works - many of them displayed as a series of "self-portraits" - draw our attention to the artist's focus on the head as a signifier of consciousness and as an object of self and self-knowing. In Audu's most recent works, he creates 3D iterations of paintings and drawings as steel sculptures made of flat plains rather than volumous solid forms as well as yarn-stitched works on canvas that explore the sensory and emotive experiences of the body.

Audu's work has shown in solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including Germany, Nigeria, Japan, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. He has shown at prestigious institutions such as Iwalewa-Haus (1995), the British Museum (2003), the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of African Art (2006) and the Museo Di Palazzo Grimani during the Venice Biennale (2015). In 2018, he was the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. In addition to his longstanding artistic practice, Audu also works as a curator, most recently organizing the traveling group exhibition "Abstract Minded: Works by Six Contemporary African Artists" that showed at the N'Namdi Center for Contemporary Art in Detroit, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art in New York and the August Wilson Center in Pittsburgh.

His work is in numerous private and public collections including the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of African Art, the British Museum, the Horniman Museum, the Newark Museum, the Hood Museum, Iwalewa-Haus and Nigeria's National Gallery. Osi Audu currently resides in New York.