Benjamin Omoike Starts Every Piece With Rope
By Benjamin Omoike
The figure in A New Dawn (2026) wears what appears to be a kaftan, and the folds of the garment move. Not literally — the work is fixed on canvas — but the layering of fabric pieces in graduated shades of green creates a convincing shift of light across cloth in motion. Omoike assembled those tones himself: darkest green, mid-tone, lightest. The fabric does the work a painter's tonal scale would do, but physically, through actual weight and texture. He planned the effect before he touched a material. When the plan met the actual fabric, it gave him exactly what he wanted.
Omoike works from Ogun State, Nigeria, and has been doing this full-time since 2014. He is 36. His process begins the same way every time: rope laid directly onto canvas to sketch out a figure or a form, before any paint, before any fabric. The rope functions as a drawing tool, establishing the subject and its proportions. Everything else — acrylic, oil pigment, newsprint, cut fabric — comes after. The result is a surface that reads as painting from a distance and reveals its construction up close, the rope lines still visible beneath the layered material.
His training came from Auchi Polytechnic in Auchi, Nigeria, where he completed an OND in General Arts and an HND in Painting, followed by workshops at the Universal Studio of Art at the National Theatre in Iguanmu, Lagos. He described what school gave him as the ability to work across mediums rather than being locked into one. The habit of improvising — of finding what a material can do under pressure — came partly from necessity: art supplies in Nigeria are expensive, and Omoike mixes his own pigments. One color he mentioned was a particular orange he achieved by combining yellow and red pigments, holding back on the red more than he had in previous work. The result was sharp and inviting in a way the heavier mixture hadn't been. That orange ended up in A New Dawn as a finishing note, applied sparingly after the fabric work was already resolved. He described it as a finished touch — knowing when to stop, knowing when to apply it, and not applying much.
The fabric sourcing is where the process gets most labor-intensive. Omoike sorts fabric himself, buying some new and collecting offcuts from tailors near his studio. He is looking for specific tones so that the fabric itself can carry the tonal work that a painter would handle with a brush. When he cannot find the right piece, he adapts. "I try as much as possible to mend it or to find what I can fix in to fill in that space," he said. At that point, instinct takes over from planning — he is looking for a color that blends, and he knows it when he sees it.
The 12 Disciples (2026, ropes, fabrics, newsprint, and acrylics on canvas) tested that process across twelve separate faces. Each figure required its own fabric palette, and the colors had to sit together across the whole composition without flattening it. The face that gave him the most difficulty was the one he designated Judas. He went to the market specifically to find a fabric for that figure, knowing the color he needed but not the pattern. When he found it, the pattern on the fabric was what confirmed the choice — the way the design flowed complemented the surrounding colors in a way a plain fabric wouldn't have. The other fabrics he had been working with were plain, and he didn't want plain. Once the Judas fabric was in place, the piece was done. The pattern, he said, shifted the mood of that figure relative to the others — not by isolating Judas but by making the face complement the rest of the composition in a way that felt resolved rather than forced.
The third work completed in the same period, Fragments of Identity (2026), continues the same material logic — ropes, fabrics, and newsprint on canvas — with identity and cultural expression as its stated territory. Across all three pieces, the newsprint functions as a layer beneath or alongside the fabric, adding texture and a visual record of the everyday world that the more abstract materials don't carry on their own. The combination is consistent enough across the body of work that it functions as a signature: you can identify the approach before you read the label.
What surprised him in A New Dawn, despite having planned it, was the depth that emerged from the fabric folds on the figure's clothing. He had used fabric in earlier work to form surface designs — patterns applied to the picture plane. In this piece he was using it differently, as a way to show how cloth behaves on a body in movement: the compression and release of folds, the shift from shadow to light across a sleeve. "If the cloth was green, you will see different shades of green," he said. "The same way the clothes are folding up, the same way I use the different shades of green to show depth, light, and also folds on the piece." The figure wears something close to a kaftan — he referenced the Hausa tradition — and the movement of the garment is what the fabric layers are tracking.
Omoike showed work in group exhibitions at Soto Gallery in Lagos in March 2024, under the +234ART banner curated by Soto Gallery on Victoria Island, and at Galeria Azur in Miami twice — Act VI in October 2024 and Set 001 in February 2025. Harmer Gallery in the UK included him in two online exhibitions: Melody of Hope in April 2024 and Reconciliation in January 2025. The Harmer shows, both online, extended the work's reach beyond the physical exhibition circuit and gave the pieces titles that signal the thematic range he's working across — hope on one end, the harder work of reconciliation on the other. The international placements are recent; the practice behind them is not. He won the Artdey Best Artist of the Year award in both 2022 and 2023, back-to-back recognition that preceded the run of international group shows.
He described his relationship with rope as one of accumulated mastery. For a decade, he said, the rope has been obeying him. That's a precise description of what happens when a material stops fighting you. The rope now does what he asks at the drawing stage, which frees his attention for the problems that come later, in the fabric and the color. The difficult twenty minutes in the studio, he said, is always the fabric sorting — the time spent hunting for the tone that fits the space that needs filling, the trips to the market when nothing in the studio is close enough.
The sketch is where the process is most controlled. Before he lays down a rope, he has already worked out the subject, the materials, the placement. He said he understands the finished piece from the sketch — he knows how it will come out. When a sketch feels too safe, he said he pushes by adding other mediums, layering in something he is known for on top of the more certain foundation. The risk comes in the material decisions, not in the initial conception.
When asked where the work goes from here, the answer came back in two directions. The next piece will start, as always, with rope. He is thinking about landscapes — something he hasn't attempted in this way before. He has worked with portraiture, with figures, with abstraction. Landscape with rope is a different problem: how to use a line-based material to render an environment rather than a figure. He acknowledged it would be a tough one. He also mentioned bamboo as a possible material if the work ever moves toward sculpture, though he was clear that for now, sculpture is a thought for later. "Let me walk with my rope," he said.
His stated ambition for the next piece is recognition — not personal recognition, but the work's. He wants someone who has never heard his name to look at a piece and know from the materials alone who made it. The rope is the primary marker. The fabric and newsprint follow. When you see it, he said, you know there's Benjamin's work — even without knowing him, you know the work through the mediums.
"You're going to find out. So just watch for the next piece. Watch out."
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