On November 15, 2025, The Benin Art Gallery opened its doors to a moving tribute “A Retrospective Journey | Ben Osaghae,” a major retrospective dedicated to the late painter whose restless lines and emotive colours helped define contemporary Nigerian art. Co-curated by Moses Ohiomokhare and Adebimpe Owoyemi, the exhibition brings together decades of Osaghae’s visual inquiries, offering viewers a deep encounter with the artist’s bold narratives and his unflinching reflections on society.

Running from November 16 to 22, 2025, the exhibition is more than a showcase; it is a remembrance. It draws audiences into Osaghae’s world, one shaped by observation, empathy, and a relentless search for truth on the canvas. From the intimate Collectors’ Night to the open viewing days, this retrospective stands as a testament to his enduring influence and the quiet, resonant power of his vision.

Africa’s celebrated curator, Moses Ohiomokhare, offers a moving tribute to the late Ben Osaghae in his essay, Ben Osaghae: The Poetics of the Everyday. Step inside his reflections and experience the artist’s world anew.

Photographs courtesy of Moses Ohiomokhare

I knew Ben Osaghae not as a distant figure in the art world, but as a man whose presence filled a room long before his colours filled a canvas. This tribute is not merely a curator’s reflection; it is a remembrance of a friend, a brother, an artist whose spirit still lingers in the spaces he once touched.

Last weekend, as we opened his retrospective exhibition, I felt again the quiet force of the man I knew: steady, observant, generous with his gift, fearless with his truth. And the reason, Ben Osaghae: The Poetics of the Everyday will remain is because it stands as a testimony to an artist who taught us to look again, to feel again, and to honour the beauty woven into daily life.

Ben lived with an attentiveness that most of us only aspire to. He carried the world in his eyes, not the grand world of spectacle and noise, but the small, breathing world of human gestures. The tilt of a market woman’s head. The mutter of a taxi driver wrestling with a Lagos morning. The soft exhaustion of a worker returning home at dusk.

These were his muses. These were his poems.

Born in 1962, shaped in Benin City, trained at Auchi Polytechnic, Ben learned early that painting was not just skill but sensibility. His hands moved with instinct, but his gaze was deliberate. He painted like a man listening — listening to light, to colour, to movement, to the unspoken things that pass between people every day.

When I think of Ben, I do not think first of style or technique, even though he was among the finest impressionists this country has known. I think of how he saw us. How he understood us. How he found dignity where others found disorder, and beauty where others found only noise.

His impressionism was not borrowed; it was born of the streets he walked. His colours carried the dust and tenderness of Nigeria. His lines breathed with the restlessness of our cities. He was not merely painting life, Ben was honouring it.

Ben had a way of turning the ordinary into memory, the fleeting into the eternal. That was his genius. And it is why his work still speaks, still moves, still insists on being seen.

At the retrospective, surrounded by his canvases, I felt him again, very thoughtful, quiet, watching us watch his work. I remembered the man who painted not for applause, but for truth. The man who believed that the everyday was enough and more than enough if only we paid attention.

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Ben Osaghae gave us that attention.
He gave us that vision.
And even in death, he continues to give.

His legacy is not merely in paint; it is in the way he taught us to see.

Moses Ohiomokhare is a renowned curator who lives and works in Lagos