Colette Omogbai

Colette Oluwabamise Omogbai is a painter associated with the Surrealist movement. She studied painting at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria, and later also studied in the UK and the US, where she received a doctorate at New York University. Due to her early rejection of figurative painting, Omogbai is regarded as a pioneer of abstract art and contemporary painting in Africa. She is also the author of the 1965 manifesto “Man Loves What Is ‘Sweet’ and ‘Obvious,’” in which she criticized the dominant paradigm of representational painting.