Oluseye Ogunlesi biography

Oluseye Ogunlesi is a Nigerian-Canadian artist. His work explores the magnitude and polyvocality of Blackness and the ways in which it moves across space, place, and time, shaping and shifting the world. Centering Yoruba cultural references in an homage to his heritage, he bends the ancestral with the contemporary and rejects the binary distinction between the traditional and the modern; the physical and the spiritual; the past and the future; what is new and what is old. Imbuing the everyday with the mythic, his work reinforces African rituals and philosophies as living, complex, and valid traditions of Black consciousness.

Ogunlesi earned a Bachelor of Commerce in Marketing, McGill University, Montreal in 2008, and a Masters of Science in Entrepreneurship from Cass Business School, London, UK. He has exhibited across Canada, USA, and Nigeria; two recent exhibitions at Patel Brown Gallery in Toronto (2020); at The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Gallery 151, New York; and Art Twenty-one, Lagos. He is a recipient of the 2017 Canada Council for The Arts New Chapter Grant, and the 2019 Toronto and Ontario Arts Council Visual Arts Grant.

Links:

• Artist website: http://www.olu-seye.com/

• Instagram: @olu.seye

REVIEWS:

• Black Ark, a 12-ft structure modelled after slave ships, asks us to see Canadian history differently. CBC, 2022.

• These Gay Figure Artists Are Reimagining the Male Gaze The New York Times, 2018

• “A Day in the Life” with Nigerian-Canadian Artist Oluseye Toronto Guardian, 2018.

• Finding Strength in Vulnerability: How These Artists are Celebrating Black Men Through Portraits CBC, 2016