Heritage Art Exchange Presents the Ojemba Collection: A New Platform for Nigerian Art
A portrait rendered in expressive brushstrokes; a landscape alive with colour; intricate surfaces that reveal themselves slowly, inviting a closer look. The Ojemba Collection brings together 30 works that offer a glimpse into the extraordinary breadth of Nigerian artistic expression, from modernist pioneers to contemporary voices.
This November, Heritage Art Exchange presents the collection in its inaugural auction, running from November 16–20 2026, offering collectors an opportunity to discover works assembled over more than a decade by a Lagos-based collector.
Paintings move between loose, expressive portraiture and more considered landscapes, with colour doing much of the talking. Oil predominates, but the collection also takes in mixed-media experiments involving metal foil and beads, offering a reminder of just how varied the materials and techniques of Nigerian modernism can be.
There is no single aesthetic thread tying the works together; rather, it is their individual approaches to identity, culture, and artistic expression that make the collection so compelling.
Artists, Histories, and Cultural Memory
Among the highlights is Untitled (1959) by Ben Enwonwu, one of the defining figures of Nigerian modernism. A landscape oil on canvas, the work offers an opportunity to engage with an artist whose international reputation helped challenge the marginalisation of African art. Enwonwu studied at London’s Slade School of Fine Art and went on to exhibit internationally, while his celebrated sculpture Anyanwu remains an enduring symbol of Nigerian artistic achievement.
Another notable inclusion is Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Nudes and Protest (1994), a large-scale plastograph on paper. A founding member of the influential Zaria Art Society, Onobrakpeya helped develop an artistic vocabulary informed by African philosophy and visual traditions. The society’s members, subsequently known as the Zaria Rebels, sought to move beyond inherited colonial aesthetics and establish new forms of artistic expression.
Elsewhere, works by Nike Okundaye, Chinwe Chukwuogo-Roy, Kolade Oshinowo and David H. Dale sit alongside those of contemporary artists including Onyema Offoedu-Okeke and Moyo Ogundipe. The latter’s Jagua Nana’s Daughter (2010), an oil on canvas, is among the works commanding attention. Ogundipe’s practice draws on the complexities of Nigerian identity and the experience of cultural displacement, reflecting the increasingly international dimensions of contemporary African art.
Giving Art a New Chapter
For the collector behind the Ojemba Collection, sharing these works is an extension of the original impulse to compile: preserving artistic legacies and ensuring that important works continue to find new audiences.
It is also the thinking behind Heritage Art Exchange itself. Founded to address a gap in the secondary art market, the platform aims to give established collectors a trusted route to bring significant works back into circulation, while opening up opportunities for new buyers to discover culturally important art.
There is something particularly fitting about beginning with a collection that brings together such a breadth of Nigerian artistic expression. Beyond the opportunity to acquire individual works, the auction offers a chance to encounter a piece of the country’s creative history – and to consider how that history continues to evolve.
The Ojemba Collection auction runs November 16–20, 2026. Explore the collection and register to bid at Heritage Art Exchange.
Article by Ellen G. Jones is a UK-based lifestyle, luxury, and culture writer. With over 20+ years of experiece, she has written about the high life for brands like Bentley, Harrods, Burgess and publications like Huffington Post, The Evening Standard, VOGUE Arabia, and The Independent.