Chibụike Ụzọma (b.1992, Port Harcourt) is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, photography, drawing, text, and video. By treating art simultaneously as a subject and an object, Chibụike’s practice engenders the image with narrative complexes and superstition of meanings— making the subject matter a pretext for performance and context a fluid ground.
Through the aesthetic vocabularies happening concurrently within each work, the specificity of Art History becomes entwined. This makes his painting a constellation of truths that lends itself as a site for intersecting and divergent discourses that runs parallel to nature. In considering the ability of images, narratives, and meanings to mutate, Chibụike’s paintings play on the agency of the audience to anthropomorphize images— preferring that the viewer experiences them as resolved compositions of disparate elements, limitless in their potential for interpretation and regeneration.
Uzoma’s first solo exhibition in the UK was held at Simon Lee Gallery, in London, in January 2023. The exhibition was accompanied by a publication featuring contributions by Ekow Eshun, Bishupal Limbu, Kat Sapera, Chibuike Uzoma, and Carlos Valladares – co-published by Simon Lee Gallery and Anomie.
Chibụike received his BFA from the University of Benin and his MFA from Yale School of Art. He lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut.