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Tayo | Artist at Mondoir

Tayo

Nationality: Nigerian

Discipline: painting

Based in: Ufa, RU

Biography

Tayo Ogunsola is a Nigerian contemporary painter based in Ufa, Bashkortostan, Russia. Working primarily in oil and acrylic, he moves between highly rendered portraiture, symbolic figuration and expressive abstraction. Across his bodies of work, the face and body become sites where pressure, memory, tenderness and transformation are made visible. Self-taught as a painter and self-described as a God-taught artist, Ogunsola holds a BA in Political Science and International Relations from Covenant University, Nigeria (2012). He has presented solo, two-person and group exhibitions in Nigeria and Russia, including Ufa, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Lagos and Ilorin. His paintings are held in private collections in the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, Russia and Nigeria.

Artist Statement

My paintings begin with the face and the body, but I am less interested in likeness than in what pressure reveals. Water, fractured planes, animals, flowers and moving lines are not decorative; they operate as signs of memory, fragility, protection and change. I build skin, reflection and transparent layers with precision, then allow parts of the image to become strange, broken or impossible. This tension between realism and abstraction lets the portrait hold several states at once: grief and beauty, concealment and exposure, chaos and concord, surrender and becoming. Identity is not presented as fixed or seamless. It is submerged, obscured, fragmented and repeatedly rebuilt. Vulnerability does not cancel strength, and chaos does not exclude concord. Across the underwater portraits, the body is placed under visible pressure but remains intensely present. Birds, butterflies, flowers, bubbles and refracted light become languages of release, tenderness and change. In Beneath the Surface, painted and unpainted fragments interrupt the face, asking how much of a person can be concealed before presence becomes absence. In Concord in Chaos, the horse carries instinctive energy through dense, broken fields, while the figure of the girl introduces trust, scale and human vulnerability. The works resist simple stories of damage and recovery. Instead, they stay at the threshold: the moment before breath returns, before a hidden self becomes visible, or before disorder finds a temporary rhythm. The central question is not whether a person can return to an untouched state, but how identity can continue after transformation.

Exhibitions

Two solo exhibitions, Ufa State Petroleum Technical University, Ufa, Russia. Two-person exhibition with a Ufa-based artist, Ufa, Russia. Two solo exhibitions, Ufa State Petroleum Technical University, Ufa, Russia Two-person exhibition with a Ufa-based artist, Ufa, Russia SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS Group exhibition, Moscow, Russia Night Museum, Art Oblaka, Bashkortostan, Russia Virtual exhibition, Saint Petersburg, Russia Two exhibitions, Zarnelia Art Gallery, Lagos, Nigeria Group exhibition, Ilorin, Kwara State, Nigeria Belleabeau Summer Fest, Nigeria Tropika Summer Splash Exhibition, Nigeria

Awards

Invited panelist for an art competition campaigning against substance and drug abuse. Invited participant in the launch of a virtual art gallery by a leading financial institution in Lagos, Nigeria.

Education

BSc, Political Science and International Relations. Msc, Oil and Gas Pipeline Transportation Engineering. PhD, Oil and Gas Pipeline Transportation Engineering.

Artworks by Tayo