Uzo Egonu valuation
Nigerian-born British modernist of interiors, portraits and the Stateless People, in flat colour and patterned line.
Uzo Egonu (1931–1996) was born in Onitsha, in Nigeria, and came to England in 1945, aged thirteen, to complete his schooling.
What a work by Uzo Egonu is worth
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Bio
Uzo Egonu (1931–1996) was born in Onitsha, in Nigeria, and came to England in 1945, aged thirteen, to complete his schooling. He studied fine art and typography at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts from 1949 to 1952 and made his life and career in London. His paintings combine the flat colour, geometry and pattern of European modernism with subjects from his own life: interiors, still lifes, landscapes and Nigerian scenes painted from memory, and figures, often writers and artists, reading, writing or at rest. From the 1970s he also made a large body of screenprints. The Stateless People series of the early 1980s, portraits addressing exile and displacement, made his name in Britain; it was shown at the Royal Festival Hall in 1986, and he was included in The Other Story, the Hayward Gallery's survey of African, Caribbean and Asian modernists in Britain, in 1989. He was among the artists representing Britain at FESTAC '77 in Lagos.
His paintings are unique and his prints come up alongside them: screenprints in editions, many made with the London printmaker Bernard Cook from the 1970s, typically signed and numbered in pencil. A provenance through the artist's family or an early collector, and any exhibition labels on the back, help to place a painting, and the date matters because his manner changed considerably over three decades.
Onitsha, Camberwell and the Stateless People
InIVA held Uzo Egonu: Past and Present in the Diaspora in 1997, and the Museum of London showed Uzo Egonu's London in 2004.
Tate Modern's Nigerian Modernism, which opened in October 2025, included his work, and in 2025 the Museum of the Home in London displayed nine of his prints it had newly acquired.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
