Ofunne Azinge - Painter

Ofunne Azinge b.1998 

 

Ofunne Azinge is a Nigerian–British artist whose practice weaves together painting, photography, and image transfer to explore cultural mergence, identity, and the politics of representation. Born in Nigeria and fostered into families of different cultural backgrounds between there and the UK, she moved between more than eleven homes before adulthood. Photography first became a way of processing this fragmented upbringing, helping her to piece together grief, memory, and belonging. Inspired early on by Malick Sidibé and Abdourahmane Sakaly, she began documenting those around her, capturing people and environments as a way to make sense of her own history.

Her return to painting during her final year of art school marked a decisive shift, as she began merging it with photography through a personalised image transfer technique. This hybrid process remains central to her practice, layering personal archives, community photographs, and images shared by her sitters into textured compositions that blend the personal and the collective.
At the core of Azinge’s current work is her fascination with women. What began as a tribute to the women who raised her has expanded into a broader project of documenting Black women across the streets of London, a process that she would like to extend worldwide. She often meets strangers in the city, photographs them, and engages in conversations about their lives, inviting them to pose in places or with objects of personal significance. Each sitter has agency in the process, choosing how they wish to be seen and often contributing their own personal photographs for the image transfers. In this way, the portraits become collaborative acts of empowerment, inscribing the strength, beauty, and complexity of Black womanhood into the canon of portraiture.

Her large-scale paintings emphasise this sense of agency. Drawing on the visual language of photography, she places women in poses historically associated with masculine authority, thereby subverting conventional ideas of power. The sitters themselves decide how they move and position their bodies, taking up space with confidence, while Azinge’s role is to witness and capture them.

Azinge ultimately conceives of her practice as documentation - an ongoing record of cultures and communities often overlooked in painting. For her, “home” is not tied to one fixed place but defined by connection: “home for me is wherever my feet land, anywhere where there is a Black woman that’s where I want to be, documenting cultures and subjects that wouldn’t normally be in paintings.”
Colour, too, carries political weight in her practice. Azinge refuses to use white when painting bodies, instead creating tones through layers of black, blue, and purple. This deliberate absence of white rejects its symbolic associations in traditional painting, ensuring her Black subjects are rendered with full depth, dignity, and presence.

Through this rethinking of portraiture - its symbols, its subjects and their poses - Azinge builds a visual community of women, personal and collective, rooted in admiration, strength, and empowerment.

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