Ozioma Onuzulike

OZIOMA ONUZULIKE WAS BORN IN 1972 IN ACHI, ENUGU STATE, NIGERIA. HE LIVES AND WORKS IN NSUKKA WHERE HE TEACHES CERAMIC ART AND AFRICAN ART AND DESIGN HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA. 

Onuzulike graduated from the department of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Nigeria. He is also a fellow of the Civitella Ranieri Centre, Umbertide, Perugia, Italy, where he undertook a residency under the UNESCO-ASCHBERG Bursary for Artists, and is an alumni of the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, USA. 

A ceramic artist and poet, Onuzulike's work largely focuses on the historical and sociological roots of the political and socio-economic turmoil in Africa and their debilitating effects on daily living on the continent. He often explores the aesthetic, symbolic and metaphorical nature of clay (his basic material) and the clay-working processes – pounding, crushing, hammering, wedging, grinding, cutting, pinching, punching, perforating, burning, firing – in his making of the multiple units that characterise his mixed-media projects. 

Ozioma Onuzulike’s work has been featured in major institutional exhibitions worldwide, including a solo presentation, Seeds Yams of Our Land, at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2019. His work has also been included in several collective exhibitions, among them Strategic Interplay: African Art and Imagery in Black and White at the Toledo Museum of Art (United States), A Celebration of Craft, organized as part of the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize at Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2024), Textile Welten at the Museum of Design in Munich (2023), and Entanglements: Colonial Collections in Decolonial Times at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge (2022).

In addition, his works have been presented at international art fairs, including The Armory Show in New York, 1-54 in London and Marrakech, Art Genève, Zona Maco in Mexico, India Art Fair in New Delhi, and Art Brussels.

In 2024, Galerie AFIKARIS hosted his first solo exhibition in Europe, When Hearts Beat with Lofty Dreams, and will dedicate a new monographic exhibition to him in May 2026.