b. 1989
With a bachelor’s degree in botany from the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, Babajide Olatunji is a self-taught, full-time studio artist. In ten years of full time studio practice.
Olatunji’s ongoing project Tribal Marks Series, which began in 2014, offers the most arresting images. These full-on faces are less portraits of the sitters, who are in fact painted from memory, and “more like avatars”. From afar, these hyper-realistic works seem like photographs, but are in fact carefully executed in charcoal and pastels.
In 2017 Olatunji was selected for inclusion in a curated section of the Royal Academy of Arts summer show, London and has work in the permanent collection of the Mott-Warsh Collection, Flint, Michigan; the Bank of England Museum, London and the John Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture & History, Lagos