Yellow House 1

COLLINS OBIJIAKU (B. 1995)  

Yellow House 1  

oil and charcoal on paper  

29 x 21 inches (73.7 x 53.3 cm)  

framed: 33 1/2 x 25 inches (85.1 x 63.5 cm)  

Executed in 2021.

PROVENANCE:  

Private collection, New York

EXHIBITED:  

Miami, Roberts Projects, Art Basel, December, 2021.

NOTES:  

Born in 1995 in Nigeria, Collins Obijiaku is a contemporary painter whose intimate portraits explore visibility, psychological presence, and the emotional complexity of everyday life. Working primarily in oil and charcoal, Obijiaku has developed a distinctive figurative language marked by richly textured surfaces, restrained palettes, and direct, confrontational gazes. His subjects—often friends, neighbors, and people encountered on the streets of Abuja—are rendered with a quiet monumentality that challenges conventional hierarchies of representation. Through close cropping and atmospheric fields of color, the artist creates deeply human portraits that emphasize vulnerability, dignity, and the politics of being seen.

Yellow House 1 brings the viewer into close proximity with a single figure, his face filling the picture plane against a luminous amber ground, his gaze level and entirely unyielding. Obijiaku works in oil and charcoal, and the interplay between the two gives his surfaces an almost geological depth: cartographical passages of mark-making that make skin feel richly textured, monumental, alive. His use of color is atmospheric rather than decorative, pressing the figure forward and forcing the encounter between viewer and subject to feel at once intimate and charged.

This is a portrait concerned with looking back. The direct gaze of Obijiaku’s subjects invokes the politics of the gaze, recalling a long tradition stretching back to canonical works such as Manet’s Olympia: those who have historically been overlooked now compel the viewer to stop and truly see them. Yet Obijiaku resists spectacle in favor of slowness, intimacy, and painterly discipline, allowing the emotional authority of the work to emerge through sustained attention and quiet intensity.

Obijiaku completed a residency at Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Senegal and has exhibited internationally in New York, London, Lagos, and Accra. His work has gained increasing recognition for its psychologically charged approach to portraiture and its contribution to the evolving landscape of contemporary African figuration.