Chidinma Nnoli (b. 1998 Enugu, Nigeria) is an artist working primarily with painting.

Her practice contemplates the importance of a single subject’s embodied experience(s), often overlaying the past onto the present, referencing the self in conflict with a background mostly saturated with religion and gendered obligations.

By treating painting as a medium advocating empathy and agency simultaneously, Nnoli uses her practice as mapping space, the body, and a landscape that holds residual memories, where ideas of freedom and entrapment continuously overlap. Through a process that often employs texture, impasto, splatter, and erasure, at the core of her conceptual concern is storytelling using self-written poetry, and engaging the personal as political. What follows are works that allude to and question the hostile structures that often limit ones own agency, especially within religious, traditional and familial spaces. In thinking through painting’s functionality beyond its capacity to be an object of statement, Chidinma Nnoli wants to create what can be principally felt; something intense, poetic and balanced in spite of its continuous state of becoming.

Nnoli earned her BFA from the University of Benin, Nigeria and has gone on to participate in critical residencies and solo and group exhibitions internationally. She currently lives and works in Lagos.