Olamilekan Abatan Nigeria, 1997

Olamilekan Abatan,  was born in 1997 in Lagos, Nigeria

The hyperrealist technique in his works are made with charcoal, pencil and traditional African fabrics wax that he uses as a background.
Abatan becomes a professional artist, two years after graduating from college with a degree in visual arts.
In the first works he creates, African culture and black power are at the center of his artistic project.
He is a fashion fanatic and believes that the promotion of African fabrics through his works contributes to giving greater visibility and importance to the African textile sector.
In recent years he begins to observe the great masterpieces of the masters of the past and is captivated by them, in particular he studies the works of Michelangelo Merrisi known as Caravaggio, observes the poses, the chiaroscuro, the lights and shadows and metabolizes the language, recreating new Africanized versions of his works, the centrality of the African man within the great classical paintings pushes him to redraw the history of art in his own way, sometimes inserting ironic elements or metaphors of contemporaneity.
A very prolific artist and rising star of contemporary African art, he often uses plastic poses and in the theatricality of his works there is no lack of allegories, the references to classicism merge with contemporaneity in a timeless unicum.
Art, according to Olamilekan, is a powerful aesthetic tool that, if used correctly, can fascinate and be effective in communicating one's thoughts to the global mainstream.