Biography

Tega Akpokona is one of Nigeria’s young emerging artists. He graduated in 2011 with a BA in fine and applied arts from the University of Benin, where he specialised in painting. Akpokona’s practice builds on the techniques of the European masters, and shares their preoccupation with the effects of light and colour, as well as their efforts to use their work to capture human emotion in all its depth and depict scenes of daily life. He tailors this approach to his time and place by addressing local socio-economic issues and the everyday realities of living in Nigeria, all of which he renders in rich layers of oil paint on canvas. Akpokona’s work is in major private collections in Nigeria and abroad. He held his first solo exhibition, Timeless, in 2016 at Terra Kulture in Lagos, Nigeria, and was among the artists selected for Tafeta’s summer 2018 exhibition.