Abe Odedina is a folk artist who draws inspiration from magical realism and oral traditions of African art, as well as ancient Greek and Yoruba mythologies. Odedina creates figurative scenes with acrylic paint on plywood, favoring a bolder, more stylized view of the world. His works may show a mundane scene, like a woman sitting on a sofa, or a surrealist portrait, like a man with a camera for a head. Odedina is a practicing architect and a self-taught painter who discovered his love of painting on a trip to Brazil in 2007. While on this revelatory trip, he fell in love with the popular magical arts of Brazil, particularly those of the Brazilian states of Bahia and Pernambuco. This fascination led him to discover the Voodoo arts of Haiti and a wider interest in folk art in general. He received the 2017 Ellsworth Kelly Award from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts in New York, sharing the prize with the Underground Museum in Los Angeles. He lives in London and Salvador Bahia.