kolapo obadiah olorunyemi

Kolapo was born in the city of Ilorin, Kwara State, Nigeria, where he started his art practice as a young teenage boy working majorly with charcoal on paper, wood, and other available surfaces within his reach. Against his parents' wish, who wanted him to be an engineer, he started art professionally in 2005 while studying physics but after graduation, he was able to get their support to pursue his passion. The Nigerian self-taught artist marries Art and Science (mainly physics) to investigate and illustrate identity and emotions through portraiture using oil and charcoal with the Science knowledge he gained after graduating with a B.SC.. in Applied Physics at Kogi State University. After a couple of international group exhibitions, Kolapo debuted his first international solo exhibition in 2022 in Vigo, Spain with the support of Agama Art and Publishing Company and the Embassy of Spain in Nigeria. In 2016, he founded “Elbowroom”, an art movement for young realistic artists with a common goal of “Freedom of expression” breaking free from the cube box of the formal Nigerian art education system. He has exhibited his work across Africa, Europe, the United Kingdom, Asia, and America with five successful solo exhibitions and lots of group exhibitions. 
Optics and kinematics are the major physics principles he uses in creating his art. A few of his paintings are anaglyph (a stereoscopic painting with the two images superimposed and painted in different colours, producing a stereo effect when viewed with a 3d glass over each eye) and lenticular ( a painting made on a textures surface having the shape of a double-convex lens).
Kolapo is presently working on a new body of works on how Futurism wished to revolutionize culture and identity by depicting the beauty of modern life and recalling the lost identity of Africans in the utopian world against dystopia. He believes we can adopt civilization, technology, and modernism without losing ourselves, our culture, our tradition, and our identity. This is what makes us who we are and we must keep it.
Looking at most African countries, He realizes that the social imaginaries that make us who we are, continue to be an issue in every society. It is even more rampant when we think of the role religion plays in determining who we are, what we believe, and how we should act and react. He believes there is a need to rethink our conceptualization of religion and to move away from the understanding of religion as the basis of identity. The illusion that religion plunges us into is often the reason for the problems of identity that most African societies struggle with today.