Bruce Onobrakpeya valuation
Nigerian printmaker who invented new ways of printing, from bronzed lino reliefs to plastographs, rooted in Urhobo myth.
Bruce Onobrakpeya was born at Agbarha-Otor in Delta State in 1932, the son of an Urhobo carver, and grew up in Benin City, where he taught art at Western Boys High School before entering the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology at Zaria in 1957.
What a work by Bruce Onobrakpeya is worth
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Bio
Bruce Onobrakpeya was born at Agbarha-Otor in Delta State in 1932, the son of an Urhobo carver, and grew up in Benin City, where he taught art at Western Boys High School before entering the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology at Zaria in 1957. There, in 1958, he was among the students who formed the Zaria Art Society, later called the Zaria Rebels, who set out to decolonise Nigerian art by drawing on African forms and stories, an approach known as natural synthesis. He became best known as a printmaker, developing his own techniques, the bronzed lino relief, the plastograph and the plastocast, alongside painting and sculpture on themes from Urhobo myth, Christianity and Nigerian history. He taught for many years at St Gregory's College in Lagos and founded the Harmattan Workshop at Agbarha-Otor in 1998.
His prints were issued in editions, so they appear more often than his paintings and his unique metal-foil and relief works; the technique, the edition and the impression matter. A provenance through the artist's studio or long-standing collectors is common.
Zaria, the Harmattan Workshop and the High Museum
In the early 1960s he illustrated Chinua Achebe's novel No Longer at Ease and other books, and he later received an honourable mention at the Venice Biennale.
The High Museum of Art in Atlanta showed The Mask and the Cross in 2023, and his work is in the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate.
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