“My portraits hold what history forgets to write down — the faces, marks, and traditions of a changing Africa.”

Artistic Wizardry of

Christian Allison

Christian Allison is a Nigerian hyperrealist artist who captures the stories, experiences, cultures, and beliefs of Africa and Africans through his paintings. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering, but he decided to pursue his passion for art full-time after working in the oil sector. He says, “I believe art chose me as I consistently had a strong passion for painting, more than I did anything else.”

 He has exhibited his work in various galleries and events in Nigeria and abroad, including the Nigeria National Gallery in Lagos, the Brick Lane Gallery in London, The Hector Diaz Gallery in Mexico, Afrikin Foundation in Miami to name a few. He has also received several awards and recognition for his artistic excellence.

Christian works with pastels on canvas, creating stunning realistic images that show the depth and geometry of the subjects he observes. He pays attention to the interaction of light and shadow, expressing his unique vision and perspective through his art. He is influenced by the photorealism movement of the 1960s and 1970s, but he also adds his own style and message to his paintings. Therefore, he aims to document and preserve the African cultural heritage through his art, and to challenge the stereotypes and assumptions that shape our perception of ourselves and others. He says, “Every painting done is a carefully selected one that embodies the stories, experiences, cultures, belief systems and individual thoughts of Africa and Africans”.

Feedbacks received on his paintings has expressed how engaging the paintings are and the strength in the stories told.” He believes that staying true to this style and message is critical to growth and relevance in the evolving art market. He hopes to leave a legacy as an artist who has successfully told the African story in the truest and unadulterated form.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

My practice centers on portraiture as a way of exploring African identity — how culture, memory, environment, and lived experience intersect. There’s no single story I’m trying to tell about what it means to be African. Each portrait is one fragment of something much bigger and still unfolding.

Body language, colour, expression, tribal marks, clothing, head ties, texture — these are the languages I work in. I don’t think of them as decoration. They’re evidence: traces of the traditions, environments, beliefs, and social structures that shape a person.

That’s part of why I keep returning to elderly subjects. Their bodies hold decades of memory. A face can read like a landscape shaped by time; a posture can carry the weight of what someone has endured. The body becomes where personal history and collective memory meet.

My current work is a deep dive into exploring human thoughts, reflections and reactions to external conditions using portraiture. It’s more intimate, more focused on emotional and psychological experience than cultural specificity.

This series looks at how sudden, unforeseen events knock us off balance — how they change what we understand about ourselves. I’m drawn to what happens after: the strange coexistence of grief and beauty, vulnerability and strength, disruption and transformation interacts within us.

I don’t try to resolve any of it. My work sits in the uncertainty — asking how experience lodges itself in us, how we live with what can’t be undone, and how a single unexpected moment can fracture us, reshape us, and reveal something at the same time.