Osaru Obaseki is a Nigerian multidisciplinary visual artist. Her preferred mediums are painting, sculpture, media, and installation. Her practice interrogates materiality, history, cultural identity, and social structures, while critically engaging with the complexities of colonial and postcolonial narratives. This distinctive approach involves melding organic matter (sand) with acrylic, with the earth-based material evoking an ancient epoch in contrast to the modern.
Her work is both personal and ancestral - an exploration of memory, preservation, and how culture continues to evolve through time, as an act of remembrance and reconstruction. Through the use of materials such as earth, bronze, glass, and naturally sourced elements, she approaches artmaking as a dialogue between the tangible and the intangible.
Each material carries its own narrative and vitality, enabling her to bridge the gap between past and present. In doing so, her process investigates the transformation of recollection and erasure, and through the act of constructing form, becomes an act of reclamation. Her practice is also about continuity and renewal, in listening and building new forms of connection in the present.
Osaru’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including most recently Africa Basel, Switzerland (2025); Horniman Museum, UK (2024); Glasstress – Berengo Studios, Murano, Italy (2024); ICCROM General Assembly, Rome (2023); AKKA Project, Venice, Italy (2023); Young Contemporaries, National Museum, Lagos, Nigeria (2020); and Re-Entanglement Project, Benin, Nigeria (2020).