Okechukwu Uwaezuoke
With Chidi Kwubiri’s family’s recent announcement that on December 26, 2025 he, their “beloved husband and father,” had “peacefully laid down his brushes to return home to God,” a quiet, seismic shock rippled through the art communities of Cologne and Lagos. Friends, collectors, fellow artists—anyone who had felt the magnetic pull of his canvases—were left stunned, hearts heavy with disbelief and grief. Kwubiri, 59, the Nigerian-born, German-based painter whose works have long hovered between the spectral and the celestial, had reportedly been ill for some time.
The artist’s final Instagram post, on December 17, 2025, presented a 150×120 cm acrylic on canvas painting, “Hello, God”, a luminous portrait of a woman suspended between prayer and awakening. Her upward gaze, hands poised near her face, suggested an “unfinished prayer,” a breath held between the known and the ineffable. The painting seemed to pulse with life: warm yellows, oranges, and golds—dappled with fragments of gold leaf—gave the surface the tactile texture of weathered stone, ancient yet alive, as if sculpted by light itself. In Kwubiri’s hands, painting became a choreography of luminous flux, energies, and atoms, capturing not merely the human form but the spiritual impulse behind every gaze, every gesture.
His studio, a space where music flowed as freely as paint, bore the quiet traces of his devotion. The mottled, dripping textures on his canvases—often mistaken for pointillism—were, in his words, “fallouts of a dripping technique” designed to lift his motifs from concrete backgrounds into a limitless universe. Figures emerged from the haze of muted, soothing colours like spectral presences, reminders of the fragile yet enduring human spirit. Every drip, every fleck of paint on canvas or floor was a footprint, a reflection of the labour of love and thought that underpinned his craft.
Colleagues and admirers responded with words that strained to capture the depth of their loss. German-Nigerian musician Ade Bantu described it as “gut-wrenching.” Art curator and gallery owner Sandra Mbanefo Obiago reflected that Chidi’s “life, light, and legacy will continue to shine brightly,” while Canada-based Nigerian artist Ibe Ananaba spoke of their last conversation, fleeting yet resonant, before Kwubiri’s passing. Germany-based artist Jimmy Nwanne and US-based artist Anthony Nsofor echoed the collective mourning, underscoring a truth too seldom acknowledged: that art, in its highest form, is both a mirror and a beacon.
Kwubiri’s work navigated the human experience with a rare subtlety: the tension between shadow and radiance, between the world we inhabit and the universe that hovers just beyond perception. His acrylics captured both the seen and the unseen and even the casual observer could sense the extraordinary attention to detail, the meditation on light and consciousness that animated his practice. To walk into one of his paintings was to confront the possibility that beauty, patience, and reverence might yet redeem the human condition.
His impact remains resolutely tangible. His works are likely to continue to tour and illuminate, from Nigeria’s prestigious Arthouse auctions to new markets across Africa, Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. Yet beyond the commerce and the exhibitions lies something far more enduring: the quiet, insistent humanity at the heart of his vision.
On January 15, 2026, his final journey will be commemorated in Germany. All those who loved him, collected his works, or simply encountered the threshold of his vision feel duty-bound to carry forward the light he conjured so tirelessly. In Kwubiri’s world, every upward gaze, every unfinished prayer, is an invitation—to witness, to reflect, and perhaps to sense, however fleetingly, the nearness of the Creator.
Leave a comment