David Obi

David Obi (b.1980) is a Nigerian Norwegian contemporary artist.
David was one of the finalists in the portrait championship at NRK in 2023.

David's paintings are influenced by his multicultural upbringing in the Nigerian city of Lagos, where he studied art at the Yaba College of Art and Technology. Through his art, David questions the feelings and emotions in people's faces and their lives trying to reflect them in his work.

David works with different mediums to create his paintings. From watercolour, oil, acrylic, ink and gouache. His works are often abstract, figures, portraits, landscapes that convey huge layers of bright and strong colors with a lot of detail and meaning. He wants to capture the complexity of people's emotions and inner nature.

His portraits synthesize the many social media images, photographs and everyday characters that inspire the artist's practice, all of which are linked to the African modern diaspora and to the political and social context we live in. In creating this series, the artist relied on traditional painting and drawing techniques that he has been experimenting with for years.

His approach is methodical, but it leaves room for intuition. Each work begins with a sketch, and then the artist prepares the canvas with a light wash of a shade. Here the gestural application of thick overlapping layers of color begins and is mainly centered on the characters' faces whose rich textures contrast with the much more delicate brushstrokes used on other parts of the canvas.