Peter Ibenana

About the Artist

From as early as I can remember, I was always making marks. Drawing was the one thing I could do ALL day long. I was born in Baltimore, MD as 1 of 3 children to Nigerian parents. I studied animation and art history in college and, later, taught art between the years 2005 and 2014, starting and ending in Baltimore. I am, currently, a museum professional.  My artistic influences include Jacob Lawrence, Ryan Larkin, and Nicolas de Staël. I work in mixed media but, primarily, in oil on canvas. My works investigate time, motion, movement, and animation through the medium of painting. Discovering painting later in my life, I’m interested in pushing the boundaries of painting in a new way by using the methods and tools of animation to examine, broadly, our interaction with time. 

Artist's Statement

My work is chiefly concerned with time and animation. I discovered painting later in my life with the urge to capture moments and motion on canvas. Rejecting the modern paradigm of painting as object and concept and refuting the representational tradition of painting as narrative, my artistic practice deconstructs painting and, seizing and jettisoning the way of seeing that espouses Western canonical painting, forces a way of seeing painting as a moment within a series of moments – a frame within an animation, a study in Time. My work does not exist in isolation, however. It considers Jacob Lawrence and On Kawara and their contributions to 20th-century history and serial painting. Yet, my work seeks to go beyond those former structures and is altering the landscape of how we understand time and animation at a very foundational level - and how we can reengage with this medium in a new way.