Rewa is a self-taught London based Nigerian artist. Born in 1987, Rewa grew up in London and started her professional career in Nigeria before moving back. She uses art as a form of therapy by envisioning the conditions of life and portraying her own emotions in her women subjects.
She acknowledges the female genre and exposes her audience to the strength, beauty and diversity of the female identity. Each of her women art pieces is unique and Rewa’s visual embodiment of them showcases their varied emotions.
Her artwork represents and glorifies women in numerous forms. Sometimes as goddesses, other times as travellers and most recently, as inexorable forces behind the naming rite of the igbo culture. Her medium of acrylics and watercolours on cartridge paper provides the platform to project her most personal experiences and life’s greatest influences.
Her first collection consisted of a 14-piece body of work, The Pantheon, which celebrates Nigerian deities. It was very well received and led to her appointment as ReLe Gallery’s 2017 Young Contemporary in Lagos, Nigeria. In the same year, the prestigious Gallery of African Art (GAFRA) in Mayfair, London invited her to participate in a joint exhibition, themed ‘Her Story: Sisterhood That Transcends’, alongside an acclaimed Dutch photographer, Dagmar van Weeghel.
Her work was also featured at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) in Brooklyn, New York as part of MoCADA’s annual 2017 gala.
Currently, she is working with the School of African & Oriental Studies (SOAS) in London, in conjunction with Cambridge University, as one of the visual creative’s for their upcoming three-year long Colonial Archives project.
Rewa is constantly inspired by the Nigerian culture and one of her main artistic goals is to continue to bring the Igbo culture and heritage to the fore. She hopes to rectify the problem of identity, particulaly the loss of self and some elements of our heritage within the diaspora.
