Chidimma Nwafor

Chidimma Nwafor (b. 1995, Nigeria) is a Lagos-based painter working primarily in oil on canvas. Her contemporary expressive figurative paintings explore memory, dreams, and the threshold between presence and absence. Rooted in personal experience, her practice reflects on sisterhood, loss, transformation, and the ways imagined memory and emotional presence shape identity.
Nwafor creates surreal psychological spaces where figures appear and dissolve within atmospheric, cloud-filled environments. Guided by dreams, memory, and intuition, she uses the body as a vessel through which emotional and spiritual states are expressed. Her layered compositions often feature repetition, doubling, and circular movement, reflecting the non-linear structure of thought and the fluid nature of the subconscious.
The material qualities of oil paint are central to her process. Its depth and flexibility allow her to build and dissolve forms simultaneously, creating surfaces that mirror the instability of memory and dreams. A restrained palette of blue-green tones evokes the feeling of memories suspended beneath the surface—quiet, emotionally weighted, and in constant transformation.
Her recent series, Two Days and a Lifetime, explores imagined memory and...

B.A in Fine and Applied Arts (University of Benin) (2013- 2017)

2025 — Shenergy, Alliance Française, Lagos, Nigeria
2024 — Nudus, Alexis Art Gallery, Lagos, Nigeria
2024 — Cut from the Same Cloth, Rele Arts Foundation, Lagos, Nigeria
2024 — After the War, 1952 Africa Art × U.S. Embassy, Abuja, Nigeria
2024 — Kuenyehia Art Exhibition, Accra, Ghana
2024 — In Search of Dream, Mitochondrial Gallery, Houston, USA
2023 — The Dreams That Freed Us, 1952 Africa Art Accelerator, Lagos, Nigeria
2023 — Discerning New Visuals Across the Atlantic, Thought Pyramid Gallery, Lagos, Nigeria
2023 — Into the Multiverse, The Artist Commune, Lagos, Nigeria
2022 — Untapped, Imnotart Gallery, Illinois, USA
2022 — Next of Kin, Thought Pyramid Gallery, Lagos, Nigeria
2021 — Vision 2020: So Far, So What?, Life in My City, Enugu, Nigeria