Nigerian-born painter Collins Obijiaku will open his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles on 7 November, presenting a group of tender, large-scale portraits at Roberts Projects. Wherever You Are, Remember Me runs until 19 December and draws on the people and places that have shaped the artist's life.

Raised in Nigeria's Kaduna region and now based in Chicago, Obijiaku paints in oil and charcoal, setting his sitters against flat fields of colour that swing from earthy ochres to jewel tones. His figures often meet the viewer's gaze directly, and the paintings carry hints of architecture, nature and older art-historical imagery that lend them a quality outside any single era.

Memory and distance run through the work. Everyday triggers, a smell of cooking, a sound, a stranger who resembles someone far away, prompt recollections that the artist folds into his compositions. The move from Kaduna to Chicago sharpened that sense of dislocation: familiar faces now appear in unfamiliar streets, and the paintings hold on to the people and places left behind while making room for new ones. Several of the paintings in the show, including Portrait of Benedicta Rufus and the large multi-figure canvas Rengaji, were made for the occasion alongside a suite of still lifes.

Rengaji looks back both to Renaissance devotional painting and to the royal processions of Obijiaku's childhood, when crowds gathered to watch the king pass. The exhibition's title speaks to the same pull between home and elsewhere: a reminder carried across distance, and an invitation to hold on to the people who made us.