Nigerian art has never been quiet, but right now it is impossible to ignore. From painters filling Lagos and foreign galleries to sculptors working in Enugu, photographers documenting everyday life in Kano and digital artists building entire worlds on a laptop, a generation of creatives is reshaping what the world expects from African art.
This list celebrates 100 of them: established names, rising voices and bold experimenters who prove that Nigerian creativity goes far beyond music and film. Whether you are a collector, a student or simply curious, consider this your introduction to the artists you will be hearing about for years to come.
1. Haneefah Adam
Haneefah Adam makes the everyday uncanny. Food, fabric, fashion, a mask, a photograph: in her hands, familiar things become vessels for memory and feeling. The Lagos-based multidisciplinary artist works across food art, painting, sculpture, installation, photography, embroidery, and digital illustration, building an imaginative practice around identity, motherhood, culture, and representation. Her breakthrough came with the 2016 #TechMeetsArt competition, followed by Life Long Percussion, her 2018 debut solo exhibition at Angels and Muse. In 2024, she received The Future Awards Africa Prize for Art. Her continuing project What We Carry, presented as a 2025 solo exhibition at Didi Museum, turns emotional labour and personal history into material form, while recent group exhibitions have included Code Switch: Icons and Inheritance, Underland and Aiyetoro: Field of Gold, River of Black. Adam’s gift is transformation: she can take an object from daily life and make it feel newly intimate, newly strange and suddenly full of history.
2. Anthony Azekwoh
Anthony Azekwoh begins where myth refuses to stay still. From his Lagos studio, the painter, sculptor, author and digital artist builds worlds from African folklore, Yoruba cosmology and the restless questions of contemporary identity. Azekwoh first trained his imagination as a writer, then taught himself digital painting after a broken laptop sent him back to pen and paper; what began as necessity became a visual universe spanning pixels, oil, acrylic, marble and books. His figures are not decorative echoes of tradition. They are protagonists, gods, mortals, ancestors and imagined beings given the scale and drama of a living archive. The Wedding, staged in 2025, assembled twenty-four portraits and three marble sculptures. No Victor, No Vanquished became the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art’s first digital painting acquisition. He has published five books and established the Rosemary Fund, which supports emerging Nigerian artists.
3. Blessing Ejiroghene Adewale
In Blessing Ejiroghene Adewale’s hands, stone comes alive. The Nigerian sculptor works in bonded stone and marble, modelling finely observed busts and human forms with the concentrated attention of a portraitist and the authority of a monument-maker. Princess, Ejiro, Self Bust and Queen Idia: A Woman Who Has It All celebrate women whose dignity doesn’t depend on a crown. Adewale’s figures are built around presence: the tilt of a head, the architecture of hair, the quiet confidence of a face brought fully into view. Her work honours women of character, labour, and historical memory, including the legendary Benin queen Idia, while keeping its gaze firmly on women’s lives today. In 2026, she was nominated for The Future Awards Africa’s Art prize.
4. Tioluwa Yoloye
Tioluwa Yoloye entered the wider Nigerian art conversation in 2026 as a nominee for The Future Awards Africa’s Art prize, one of the continent’s most visible platforms for young creative achievement. The nomination places Yoloye in a moment of rapid artistic expansion, as new practices find audiences through galleries, independent exhibitions, digital communities, and cultural media at once. It is also a significant early marker: a public signal that the artist’s creative voice has begun to travel beyond the studio and into a national conversation about the future of African art. Yoloye’s story is one of arrival, but not arrival as a finished state. It is the exciting point at which a developing practice begins to gather attention, expectation and possibility.
5. Echezona Ogudu
Echezona Ogudu, who works as Zona Strings, turns remnants into radiance. Discarded fabrics and repurposed materials become colour, contour, texture and skin in a body of portraiture that refuses to treat waste as the end of a story. Ogudu patiently assembles what has been overlooked until it becomes a face: expressive, tactile, and inseparable from the material history held in its surface. The portraits are therefore likenesses and acts of reclamation at once. Through Zona Art, Ogudu has also connected studio practice to training and skills-sharing, supporting young Africans while advocating for more resourceful approaches to waste. The work strikes an unusual balance of tenderness and ingenuity; its beauty comes from the fact that nothing is neutral, not even the scraps that make up the image. Ogudu was nominated for The Future Awards Africa’s Art prize in 2026.
6. Deborah Segun*
Deborah Segun paints the space between being seen and seeing oneself. Her Lagos studio produces fragmented figures, luminous colour, and compressed spaces where the female body becomes a site of contemplation, self-acceptance, and reinvention. Drawing on a deconstructed, almost Cubist language, Segun breaks the face into shifting planes and exaggerates the silhouette, transforming the body into something at once guarded, sensuous and emotionally exposed. Works including Enjoying the Moment, Mentally I Am Here, Pouring Into Me and A Space To Flourish read like pages from a visual diary, but their concerns extend far beyond the personal. Her paintings ask how women are represented, how identity changes and how a person learns to make peace with her own reflection. Her solo exhibitions include How To Fall In Love, Where Is My Mind?, Letting Yourself Be and A Moment To Myself at Saatchi Gallery.
7. David Ngaji
David Ngaji’s paintings feel like encounters with figures who have arrived carrying a secret. His symbolic figurations and visual cosmologies draw on ritual, allegory, memory and mythology, probing the charged distance between the human and the divine. A graduate of Painting at the University of Benin, Ngaji uses the body as a threshold, a place where private experience, collective inheritance, and spiritual tension can occupy the same image. In Figure Study, his 2024 oil-on-canvas work shown in The Lagos Salon: Pamphlets, he concentrates that inquiry on face, gesture, and atmosphere. His recent exhibitions include Rele’s Young Contemporaries 2024 and Of Mind and Myth, a 2025 two-person presentation with David “Kaydee” Otaru. Ngaji’s figures seem to know that a portrait is never only a portrait. They carry ritual echoes, remembered stories, and questions a single look can’t resolve.
8. David “Kaydee” Otaru
David “Kaydee” Otaru paints the mind as a place where images never sit still. The Lagos-based, self-taught artist combines traditional painting with digital aesthetics, fragmented composition and surreal spatiality, making canvases that shift as the viewer’s attention shifts. Even Umbrellas Have Roofs, Time Stiirred, Focus Blurred, Life in HD and Cracks Make Room belong to a recent body of work in which perception becomes both subject and material. Otaru’s 2025 exhibition Of Mind and Myth at Rele, presented with David Ngaji, placed his perceptual distortions beside Ngaji’s symbolic cosmologies. Earlier shows, Voices from the West in Paris and Africa Supernova at Kunsthal KAdE, extended that conversation beyond Lagos. Otaru is interested in the instability of looking: how an image can fracture, how a familiar space can become strange, how technology can alter the emotional temperature of paint.
9. Charles Lasisi*
Charles Lasisi, recently identified in coverage as Lasisi Kehinde Charles, paints with the confidence of someone who knows looking can be an act of power. His bold colour fields and assertive figures give Black youth a commanding visual presence, while his references to music and pop culture turn familiar icons into studies of performance, freedom and self-fashioning. In Quiet Rebellion, his acrylic portrait of Grace Jones turns the subject’s famous defiance into an atmosphere: electric, glamorous, and entirely unwilling to apologise. Lasisi’s work appeared in Wake Up!, the 2026 exhibition at Angels & Muse curated by Awele Onwordi, where painting, photography and digital art met around youth culture, lived experience and new visual languages. His subjects are not passive objects of observation; they occupy the frame like authorities within their own space. Lasisi’s paintings are bright without being lightweight, immediate without being shallow.
10. Awele Onwordi
Awele Onwordi makes pictures, but she also makes room. Her multidisciplinary practice moves through character art, illustration, creative logo design, album covers and exhibition-making, carrying the playful charge of popular culture into spaces built for serious looking. A first-class Middlesex University graduate, Onwordi founded and curated Wake Up!, a Lagos platform that brought emerging Nigerian voices into public view. The 2026 exhibition at Angels & Muse included her own works, Nicely Captured and Space Girl, alongside photography, painting, and digital art by a new generation of artists. Her visual language is animated and immediately inviting, but never merely decorative; it explores how young people build identity from cartoons, music, street culture, technology, and lived experience. As a curator, Onwordi allows those references to coexist without flattening them into one style.
11. Franklyn Okoye*
Franklyn Okoye works where graphic design, art and contemporary identity begin to blur. A Lagos-based graphic designer and artist, he explores living inside images, building, editing, and performing versions of the self in a culture shaped by screens, brands, music, and rapid visual exchange. His work was presented in Wake Up!, the 2026 exhibition at Angels & Muse curated by Awele Onwordi, and returned in the exhibition’s second edition, Young, Wild, Free. Across these projects, Okoye’s practice sat alongside street culture, fashion, photography, digital illustration, and the restless visual language of Nigerian youth. The themes of identity and hyper-reality are especially alive in a moment when the image is no longer simply a record of who we are, but a place where identity is made. Okoye brings design intelligence to that problem.
12. Chuka Onwordi*
Chuka Onwordi’s digital art is where anime’s visual pleasure meets the darker weather of memory. In Wake Up!, his works Don’t Cry and Incubation used anime-influenced forms to build images that were polished, fantastical and emotionally exposed at the same time. Their surfaces invite the eye in; their titles suggest something more fragile waiting underneath. Onwordi’s practice was also part of Young, Wild, Free, the second edition of the Wake Up! exhibition, where his work was described through the recurring tensions of death, melancholy and beauty. That combination gives the images their charge. They do not treat popular culture as a costume; they use its visual freedom to speak about feelings that are hard to stage directly. Onwordi belongs to a digital generation of Nigerian artists who can move through global image cultures without surrendering their own emotional register. His screens are luminous, but they are not weightless.
13. jekein Lato-Unah
Jekein Lato-Unah is a Nigerian multidisciplinary artist, activist and trained lawyer whose work explores womanhood, identity, patriarchy and the socio-political realities of Nigerian society. Born in Lagos in 1996, she began working with ceramics at 16 and formally pursued painting, pottery and performance art. Originally self-taught, she studied performance art under renowned Nigerian artist Jelili Atiku in 2016. Working across painting, digital art and mixed media, her practice uses vibrant colours, symbols and patterns to celebrate Black women, challenge gender inequalities and reimagine their place in society. Her works have been exhibited at Omenka Gallery, the University of York’s Norman Rea Gallery and internationally. Notable exhibitions include OBINRIN (2021), Memories (2022) and +234ArtFair (2024). She received SME100 Nigeria’s 25 Under 25 award for her contributions to arts and culture and was nominated for Her Network’s Woman of the Future Award.
14. Chinecherem Ifedilichukwu
Chinecherem Peace Ifedilichukwu makes cloth remember. The community-based textile artist works through Isijiakwa, a wax-resist dyeing process, weaving Uli symbols, personal experience and the difficult realities of womanhood into richly patterned fabric works. Her pieces are not nostalgic exercises in preservation; they are active, contemporary declarations. In Free for All, a charged arrangement of bodies holds the pressure of authority and the desire for liberation. In Ikenga, Wounded Lioness and Oil on Head, colour and symbol become ways of speaking about strength, pain, cultural continuity and the burdens carried across generations. Ifedilichukwu won the 2024 Kuenyehia Prize for Contemporary Art and has exhibited in Rele’s Young Contemporaries, the Kuenyehia Prize exhibition, Patronage and +234 Art Fair. In 2026, she joined RMB Latitudes’ Nigeria Focus, extending her work from Lagos into a wider African art conversation.
15. Tammy Ubani
Tammy Ubani is a Port Harcourt-based creative whose public identity under the handle @tammyubaniart carries the quick, conversational energy of contemporary Nigerian culture. She belongs to a generation making its presence felt through informal networks, online communities, and self-directed creative lives, spaces where art, commentary, popular culture, and everyday observation often overlap. Ubani’s emerging profile adds a Port Harcourt point of view to a national art conversation frequently narrated from Lagos, and gestures towards the creative richness of the Niger Delta’s wider cultural landscape. Something important about an artist at this stage of becoming: the work is still gathering its vocabulary, the audience is still learning how to read it, and each new appearance can change the scale of the practice. Ubani’s place in the current conversation is defined by that sense of possibility: a creative voice moving from private experimentation toward a more visible public life.
16. Tunde Adebona
Tunde Adebona is a digital artist who turns cultural curiosity into image. His work draws on history, emotion, traditional craft, cartoons, anime, and comic books, creating a visual language that can feel playful one moment and deeply reflective the next. Adebona began drawing and experimenting with craft as a child, then found a new direction in 2015 when his first personal laptop opened the door to digital art. Growing up in Minna exposed him to ethnic and cultural worlds beyond his immediate experience, sparking a lifelong interest in how people carry heritage and tell stories. His portrait of writer Molara Wood reflects that interest in culture and inheritance, while his broader practice moves through illustration, portraiture and visual storytelling. Adebona also draws inspiration from a family lineage of craftsmen, treating his name and background as part of the archive from which he works.
17. Olaolu Slawn
Olaolu Slawn brings the swagger of Lagos street culture into painting, sculpture, design and public spectacle. Born in Lagos and based in the UK, he works with cartoon-like figures, raw marks, spray paint, acrylic, ink, and Abstract Expressionist gesture, making images that are funny, confrontational, and alive to politics, race, identity, and consumer culture. His artistic education began at Wafflesncream, Lagos’s pioneering skate shop, and continued through the apparel collective Motherlan, before he turned to painting during the 2020 lockdown. Slawn’s first exhibition at Truman Brewery followed in 2021; he made his auction debut at Sotheby’s in 2022. He designed the 2023 Brit Awards statuette, becoming the youngest and first Nigerian-born artist to do so, and later designed the 2024 FA Cup Trophy. Works such as Hot Head, Nigeria, My Country, First Kiss and Bully show an artist who refuses the polite distance often expected of contemporary painting.
18. Chigozie Obi
Chigozie Obi makes images that understand the archive as something intimate. Working across painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, and digital illustration, the Nigerian artist centres the lives of women and girls, Black womanhood, Igbo culture, community, and the ordinary details through which life becomes legible. Documentation is central to her practice, but Obi is not simply recording what is already there; she is creating spaces for reflection, self-acceptance and healing. After studying Visual Arts at the University of Lagos, she developed a body of work that moves with remarkable ease between personal encounter and social observation. Her exhibition history includes ART X Lagos, Gasworks, 1-54 Marrakech, Modern Matriarchs and In the Stillness of Being. A photograph can preserve evidence, a drawing can loosen memory, a print can repeat and transform a gesture, while paint can give interior experience a new scale. Obi’s work is tender without being timid.
19. Ayanfe Olarinde
Ayanfe Olarinde has made the crooked line beautiful. The self-taught Lagos artist’s signature scribbling moves through photography, ink, acrylic, wire, found objects, collage, drawing, painting, and sculpture, turning restless marks into a language of emotion, self-image, and mental health. The line is never merely decorative. It records frustration, movement, and the uneven route toward self-knowledge, while her layered surfaces question the stories society tells about bodies, identity, and belonging. Olarinde’s practice also draws on popular culture, governance, Yoruba heritage, and African folktales, preserving old forms even as she subjects them to contemporary pressure. Genesis, In Her Own Image and Unapologetically, Stephen show the range of her visual vocabulary, from intimate self-examination to bold cultural commentary. Her solo exhibition In The Beginning, And So It Goes… and group presentations, including Contemporary Figuration: Between Body & Metaphor and Here & Now, have introduced her work to wider audiences.
20. Adeoluwa Oluwajoba
Adeoluwa Oluwajoba builds worlds out of image fragments. The Lagos-based mixed-media artist works across painting, collage, and photographic printmaking, following an image as it is transferred, reproduced, layered, and made strange. Bodies and landscapes appear inside intricate compositions that feel part memory, part excavation, part daydream. In Imagehaunted I and Imagesites of Excavation, cyanotype, acrylic, ink and collage become more than techniques; they become ways of asking how a place enters the imagination. Oluwajoba’s 2026 G.A.S. Fellowship residency took that inquiry into Lagos itself. Experimenting with cyanotype on fabric, the artist moved through public spaces of transit and leisure, considering how bodies occupy the city and where reflection or dreaming can still happen inside its constant motion. The residency culminated in The Cyanotype Studio, a workshop and open-studio presentation.
21. Meju Lawrence
Meju Lawrence makes paintings that whisper and stay with you. The Lagos-based visual artist and designer balances precision with expressive spontaneity, building images whose clean structure leaves generous space for gesture, atmosphere and implied story. Under the Moonlight, Eze Goes to School, and Ndidi and Son suggest an interest in ordinary lives and the quiet dramas within family, learning, night, and home. Lawrence was included in Code Switch: Icons & Inheritance at The 1897 Gallery in Lagos in 2025, placing the work within a conversation about the images through which identity and inheritance are carried forward. His restraint carries a particular confidence. The compositions don’t need spectacle to hold attention; a figure, a title, or a carefully placed silence can make the scene expand in the mind. Lawrence’s work understands that a picture can be gentle without being slight.
22. Joseph Obanubi
Joseph Obanubi treats the image as something alive: unstable, mobile and always capable of becoming another image. The Nigerian multidisciplinary artist, designer, art director and educator works across photography, moving image, installation, graphic design and tactile objects, assembling fragments from everyday experience into what they call visual bricolage. Their practice asks how identity changes through migration, memory, translation and the politics of who owns an image. Projects including Techno Heads, Mobile Persons, Of/By/For The Screens and Existential Support move between digital manipulation and materials gathered from secondhand spaces, creating visual worlds that are futuristic without losing their physical grit. Obanubi has exhibited at the Research Centre for Society, Technology and Ecology in Africa, Krannert Art Museum, the Museum of Photography Lianzhou, Sharjah Art Foundation and Somerset House.
23. Mobolaji Ogunrosoye
Mobolaji Ogunrosoye makes portraits that refuse to remain still. The Lagos-born artist works with photography and collage, combining found and captured images of West African women with burnt paper, coffee granules, archival surfaces, magnifying lenses and digital manipulation. The result is portraiture of distortion and perception: faces appear, break apart, and return, carrying the marks of how women are looked at, remembered, and made visible. Her 2018 solo exhibition Loose Woman introduced this direction, while a 2020 virtual residency at Window, Winnipeg allowed her to bring analogue and digital collage into a single, harmonised medium. Ogunrosoye was a finalist for the 2021 Art X Prize. In the Tomi, In Grimace, Displaced series and works such as Adja and Estelle and Adja, material damage becomes expressive language. Her large-scale self-portraits make the viewer part of the problem, placing us inside the act of looking rather than outside it.
24. Abe Ogunlende
Abe Ogunlende paints with a quiet brightness. His pared-back compositions draw on culturally blended images, personal experience and the conversation between individual identity and society, using simple forms and vivid colour to make ordinary scenes feel newly charged. A Good Day for a Swim, Constellations, Make Room and Living-Room are populated by figures who seem caught between private thought and public life. Ogunlende’s simplicity is not an absence of ideas; it concentrates them. The image opens easily, then deepens as the viewer notices the social and emotional questions within the colour. His work was included in We Are Enough in Paris, an Afirika Artfest exhibition reflecting on the stigmas and limiting beliefs that shape contemporary African societies. Ogunlende’s paintings offer an inviting surface without giving away everything beneath it.
25. Kadara Enyeasi*
Kadara Enyeasi has spent his career asking what the body can become inside an image. Trained as an architect, the Lagos-based multidisciplinary artist brings an acute sense of form, space and perspective to photography, digital collage, painting, sculpture and installation. His Human Encounters series used self-portraiture to examine vulnerability, masculinity, performance and the politics of the Black male nude, turning the artist’s own body into both subject and constructed space. From there, his practice has moved through fashion, portraiture, urban life and abstraction, always testing the boundary between intimacy and spectacle. Enyeasi has exhibited at Zeitz MOCAA, Foam Museum, Palais de Tokyo, the Africa Centre, Bozar Festival and Red Hook Labs, and completed an Arthouse Foundation residency in Lagos. His recent presentation, Parasomnia, draws on sleep-paralysis experiences, translating them into allegories of grief, memory, and transformation. Enyeasi’s images are seductive but never settled.
26. Adeniyi Adewole
Adeniyi Adewole gives sculpture a vivid, watchful presence. The Lagos-based artist models clay and uses fibreglass casting to create figurative forms that sit somewhere between portrait, character, and psychological study. Colour animates his subjects: faces, bodies, and animal forms arrive with a lavish surface language that makes the material feel newly alive. Adewole’s practice explores human and animal characterisation, the contradictions of everyday life, and the personal experiences that shape how a figure is seen. Trained in General Arts and Sculpture at Yaba College of Technology, he has developed a tactile approach that is both technically assured and emotionally open. His work has appeared in group exhibitions including Crossroads, where painting, sculpture, photography and mixed media converged around questions of culture and personal freedom.
27. Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Njideka Akunyili Crosby builds rooms where several worlds can exist at once. Born in Nigeria and based in the United States, she layers acrylic, coloured pencil, photo transfers and collage into intimate interiors populated by family memory, Nigerian visual culture and the textures of diasporic life. Her paintings are richly detailed without losing the hush of a private moment: a meal, a gathering, a domestic threshold becomes a stage for migration, belonging and the complicated beauty of living between places. Works such as Eko Skyscraper turn architecture into memory, allowing Lagos to appear not as a backdrop but as an emotional presence. Major institutions, including the National Gallery of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, hold Akunyili Crosby’s work, and she has shown internationally in exhibitions that have made her one of the most recognisable painters of contemporary Nigerian experience.
28. Nike Davies-Okundaye
Nike Davies-Okundaye has made textile tradition impossible to overlook. A fifth-generation Adire artist and weaver, she carries Yoruba indigo resist-dyeing into contemporary art through cloth, painting, storytelling and an extraordinary commitment to teaching. Adire is not merely a technique in her hands; it is a living language of pattern, labour, memory and communal identity. Through the Nike Art Gallery and her arts and culture centres, Davies-Okundaye has created spaces where artists, especially women and young people, can learn, work and build a future from inherited knowledge. Her paintings and textile works return to family, womanhood and Yoruba mythology, balancing personal experience with cultural history. In 2026, her work appeared in Crosscurrents and Affinities, placing her practice in dialogue with contemporary painting and textile experimentation. Her influence reaches far beyond the studio: she has made inheritance feel active, something that can be worn, taught, remade and carried into the future.
29. TY Bello
TY Bello photographs people into public memory. Her portraits, intimate, luminous and attentive to the person behind the image, have helped define the look of contemporary Nigerian culture across music, fashion, journalism and public life. A photographer, singer and social activist, Bello is known for the emotional intelligence of her gaze: she can make a celebrated face feel newly vulnerable, or find quiet grandeur in someone the world has overlooked. Her work includes portraits of Nigeria’s sitting presidents, and her creative and social projects have raised funds for orphaned children and given visibility to people on the margins. In 2016, her encounter with bread seller Olajumoke Orisaguna became a widely reported story of image, opportunity and sudden recognition. Bello’s practice is built on attention. She stays with a face, a gesture or a life long enough for its complexity to emerge, which is why her photographs feel both iconic and deeply human.
30. Ololade Lawal
Ololade Lawal makes detachment visible. Based in Lagos, the artist moves between lens-based media, abstract painting, and an increasingly interdisciplinary practice, translating lived experience into images that feel suspended between evidence and disappearance. Her work explores what happens when a person, a place, or a memory becomes difficult to hold: the emotional afterimage of separation, the distance within familiar situations, the quiet evidence left behind. Lawal studied Mass Communication at Yaba College of Technology and had her first solo exhibition in 2023. Since then, she has participated in group exhibitions and art fairs, joined the Kuta Arts Residency, and taken part in the G.A.S. Foundation’s Imora Arts Intensive Fellowship. Her 2026 presentation Until We See Next Time at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, extends a practice that refuses easy resolution. Lawal’s images do not explain detachment; they let us feel its atmosphere.
31. Oluwatobiloba Fasalejo
Oluwatobiloba Fasalejo paints the quiet rituals that hold a life together. Working in acrylic and mixed media, the Nigerian artist builds intimate figurative scenes from domestic spaces, childhood memory and the emotional charge of ordinary gestures. In paintings such as Evenings with Mum, More Than a Pair and Morning Devotion, the home becomes an archive of care, absence, faith and the habits through which people learn to belong to one another. Fasalejo’s figures often seem caught before or after speech, when a room is full of feeling but nothing needs to be announced. Based in Ondo, he brings a contemplative energy to contemporary Nigerian painting, allowing atmosphere to carry as much weight as narrative. His inclusion in RMB Latitudes’ 2026 Nigeria Focus places this assured practice within a wider conversation about emerging Nigerian artists. Fasalejo’s gift is sensitivity: he makes stillness feel inhabited, and the familiar worth remembering.
32. Omolola Coker
Omolola Coker brings batik’s material intelligence into a contemporary figurative practice full of colour, tenderness, and psychological depth. Working with dye, oil, and acrylic, she creates images where pattern and painted form meet, letting the fabric’s history remain visible within the figure. Her subjects explore questions of home, rest, heritage, relationships, and the emotional lives that unfold beneath everyday appearances. Coker’s 2025 solo exhibition In Bloom introduced a body of work attentive to growth and becoming; in 2026, she won the inaugural MYMA Art Prize and presented work in What Is Given and RMB Latitudes’ Nigeria Focus. Those milestones reflect the confidence of a practice that is both rooted and open, drawing from textile knowledge while refusing to treat it as fixed. Coker’s paintings are generous at first glance, but their real power gathers slowly.
33. Praise Sanni-Adeniyi (PraiseArt)
Praise Sanni-Adeniyi, known as PraiseArt, paints the emotional weather of existence. Her practice draws on survival, beauty, vulnerability, and the psychological spaces people inhabit when the visible world no longer tells the whole story. Rather than treating the figure as a static subject, she uses visual storytelling to suggest inner movement: the mind turning over a memory, the body carrying an unseen pressure, a moment of stillness becoming a form of endurance. Sanni-Adeniyi studied law at the University of Lagos, an education that gives her work an additional awareness of systems, rights and the structures that shape a person’s life. Yet the paintings remain intimate rather than declarative. They focus on the private theatre of being human: how we protect ourselves, how we persist, and how beauty can survive alongside difficulty.
34. Mayowa Alabi (Shutabug)
Mayowa “Shutabug” Alabi makes digital art with the pulse of a hand-drawn original. A multidisciplinary visual artist, graphic designer, photographer, and animator based in Lagos, Alabi brings deliberate rawness to his digital paintings, preserving the irregularity, humour, and emotional directness that make an image feel alive. His practice moves easily between character, illustration and design, creating work that is visually immediate but never generic. Alabi’s artistic path began in 2017 when he won the European Union and UN Women Gender Equality Picture It Comic & Cartoon Competition. Since then, he has held solo exhibitions in Lagos and Nairobi and worked on creative projects for Meta, Uber and Desperados. He also contributed illustrations to Kim Chakanetsa’s Africana: An Encyclopedia of an Amazing Continent. These achievements reveal an artist comfortable moving across audiences and formats without losing his signature energy.
35. Peju Alatise
Peju Alatise builds worlds where women, spirits, histories and objects speak back. An artist, architect, and writer, she works across sculpture, installation, painting, and narrative, drawing out the hidden histories embedded in language, cloth, architecture, and social relations. Her practice is deeply concerned with gender, power, migration, and spirituality, but her storytelling is never reduced to explanation; it arrives through characters, materials, and images that seem to carry lives of their own. Flying Girls, presented in the Nigerian Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, brought international attention to this expansive imaginative universe. Works such as If Nigeria Will Not Wear Her Own Cloth, She Deserves to Go Naked, and Cloth Is Never Just Cloth turn fabric into a question about identity, value and belonging. Alatise’s architectural training gives her installations structure, while her writing gives them voice.
36. El Anatsui
El Anatsui turns the discarded into the monumental. Born in Ghana and long based in Nigeria, he has built an extraordinary body of sculpture from bottle tops, liquor seals, wire and other reclaimed materials, transforming industrial remnants into vast, shimmering surfaces that resemble cloth, metal, skin and landscape all at once. His celebrated installations refuse the fixed geometry of conventional sculpture: they can be draped, folded, gathered and reconfigured, making each encounter a new event. Beneath the splendour lies a deep meditation on consumption, trade, memory, cultural exchange, and the histories materials carry. Works such as LuwVor I, Vukawo and Searching for Jacob’s Ladder demonstrate a practice that can feel intimate at the scale of a single link and overwhelming at the scale of a museum wall.
37. Victor Ehikhamenor
Victor Ehikhamenor’s work moves like a conversation between an altar, an archive and a city wall. The Nigerian artist, writer, and photographer works across painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and literature, drawing on Edo visual traditions, spirituality, history, and politics to create images dense with pattern and memory. His surfaces are often crowded with signs, but never closed; they invite the viewer to follow a trail through inherited symbols, colonial histories, and the emotional afterlife of place. Ehikhamenor represented Nigeria at the 2017 Venice Biennale and has shown internationally at Dak’Art, the Mediations Biennale, Jogja Biennale and the Onassis Foundation, among many other platforms. He is also a writer whose essays and criticism have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Guernica, BBC and The Washington Post, and the founder of Angels & Muse, a Lagos space supporting contemporary art.
38. Bruce Onobrakpeya
Bruce Onobrakpeya gave Nigerian modernism new tools. A painter, printmaker, sculptor, and experimental artist, he has spent more than six decades pushing the possibilities of relief printing, metal foil, plastocast, painting, and mixed media, often drawing on Urhobo mythology, Nigerian history, folklore, and the rhythms of everyday life. As a member of the Zaria Art Society, often remembered as the Zaria Rebels, he helped shape a generation determined to build modern African art from local knowledge rather than borrowed formulas. His influence continues through the Onobrakpeya Art Centre in Agbarha-Otor and the annual Harmattan Workshop, where artists gather to experiment, exchange methods, and extend the life of printmaking. His work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, and Malmö, and is held in collections worldwide.
39. Nengi Omuku
Nengi Omuku paints bodies that seem to be made of weather. Working on sanyan, a traditional western Nigerian fabric made from wild moth silk and industrial cotton, she creates expressive figures suspended in atmospheric landscapes where the human and the natural continually exchange forms. Her paintings explore memory, displacement, mental health, and the possibility of repair, but they are also sensuous objects: the cloth’s weave remains visible, giving each image a physical history before the first figure appears. Born in Warri and working between Lagos and London, Omuku has shown at Hastings Contemporary, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, the Musée de l’Art et de l’Histoire in Geneva and institutions across Europe, Africa and the United States. Her residencies include Civitella Ranieri and Black Rock Senegal, and her work is in collections at the British Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, and the Whitworth.
40. Toyin Ojih Odutola
Toyin Ojih Odutola makes line behave like geography. Born in Ile-Ife and based in the United States, the Nigerian-American artist creates intricate drawings and paper works in ballpoint pen, pencil, pastel, and charcoal, building figures whose skin becomes terrain and whose stories unfold across imagined worlds. She combines found imagery, personal memory and speculative narrative to examine identity, representation, class, migration and belonging. Her characters appear in constructed social universes—families, landscapes, interiors, and histories that feel invented but emotionally true. The Whitney Museum, the Barbican, SFMOMA, Kunsthalle Basel, and the Hamburger Bahnhof have presented Odutola’s work, and she represented Nigeria at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Her 2025–26 Berlin exhibition U22 Adijatu Straße continued this interest in figurative storytelling. Her achievement is not only technical virtuosity; every mark maps an interior life, turning the body into a place where an entire story can be travelled.
41. Victor Ekpuk
Victor Ekpuk transformed a historical writing system into a living contemporary language. Based in the United States, the Nigerian-born artist draws, paints, sculpts and builds installations from the signs and visual logic of Nsibidi, the ideographic system associated with southeastern Nigeria and neighbouring regions. In Ekpuk’s hands, those references become energetic networks of marks: part script, part map, part record of human encounter. As a Smithsonian Fellow, he has exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Dak’Art, the Havana Biennial, the Johannesburg Biennale, the New Museum, and the Institut du Monde Arabe. The Smithsonian and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston hold his work. In 2025, he received the Margaret Herz Demant African Art Award. Ekpuk makes the ancient feel present: his marks remember where they come from, but move with the force of a language still being invented.
42. Laolu Senbanjo
Laolu Senbanjo treats the body as a canvas, an instrument, and a sacred space. The Nigerian-born, Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist works across visual art, music, performance, fashion, and activism, drawing on Yoruba spirituality and the flowing lines he calls Afromysterics. His body paintings and large-scale works turn pattern into movement, creating images that seem to grow across skin, walls, clothing and objects. Senbanjo’s work is as comfortable in a gallery as it is on a stage or in a music video: he has collaborated with Beyoncé, Burna Boy, Alicia Keys, Serena Williams, Swizz Beatz, J Balvin, Bad Bunny and Lupita Nyong’o, and served as a creative force behind Beyoncé’s Lemonade era. Yet the collaborations are only one part of the story. At the centre of his practice is a belief that art can reconnect people to spirit, ancestry and possibility.
43. Modupeola Fadugba
Modupeola Fadugba makes systems visible by turning them into images, games and stories. The Nigerian multimedia artist works across painting, drawing, film, installation, and research, using repeated figures, diagrams, and playful structures to examine social inequality, education, access, and how institutions shape everyday life. Her project Dreams from the Deep End, which began with the racialised history of swimming and expanded through community collaboration, became a series of paintings, installations and a documentary that won a New York Emmy in 2022. Fadugba’s background in chemical engineering, economics and education gives her practice a rare ability to move between social research and visual invention. In 2026, The Chemistry of Water at the Royal Watercolour Society in London extended her long engagement with water, memory and collective experience.
44. Marcellina Akpojotor
Marcellina Akpojotor makes paintings from lives stitched into cloth. Working with discarded Ankara sourced from fashion houses, the Lagos-based artist builds layered collage paintings that move between painting, sculpture and textile, allowing pattern to carry family history and social expectation. Her practice attends to femininity, identity, labour, and women’s empowerment, but its images are never merely illustrative. The fabric is active: it folds, interrupts, covers and reveals, turning the surface into a field of negotiation. Akpojotor was selected for Rele’s Young Contemporaries in 2017, received the Ronke Ekwensi Salon fellowship and held her first solo exhibition, She Was Not Dreaming, at Rele in 2018. Her work has appeared at L.A. Louver, the Martin Museum and Carnegie Museum, and at Art Basel Miami, Art Dubai and FNB Art Joburg. Her art understands fabric as a record of who we are and material for becoming someone else.
45. Dennis Osadebe
Dennis Osadebe paints a future with a memory. His vivid figures, architectural shapes, and saturated colour fields draw on Nigerian visual culture, fashion, popular imagery, and digital design, creating a style that feels both familiar and fantastical. Osadebe’s characters often appear masked, helmeted, or transformed, as if moving between the human, the technological and the mythic. Beneath the playful surfaces is a sustained interest in tradition and innovation: how inherited forms can be remixed, how modern identity is performed, and how the image can travel from the gallery into popular culture. His solo exhibitions include Forcing Connections in New York, as well as presentations in Berlin, London, Paris, and Cape Town. His work has appeared at the National Gallery in London and fairs including Frieze, while collaborations have extended to Louis Vuitton, the NBA and Hermès. Osadebe studied business before making art his full-time language. The result is painterly, graphic and unmistakably alive.
46. Temitayo Ogunbiyi
Temitayo Ogunbiyi asks what a playground can remember. The Nigerian-American artist works across drawing, installation and socially engaged practice, exploring movement, public space, plant life and play. Her participatory playgrounds are sculptural environments shaped by local materials and community knowledge. Her drawings gather plants, gestures and imagined maps into delicate networks that make movement feel both personal and political. Ogunbiyi’s work has appeared at the Noguchi Museum, the Power Plant, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Frieze Sculpture and the 2026 Venice Biennale, where she participated in In minor keys. Her projects invite children and adults to reconsider the public realm as a space for curiosity, encounter and shared authorship. In Ogunbiyi’s art, play is not an escape from serious questions. It asks how we might build a city and a future in which more bodies have room to move.
47. Wura-Natasha Ogunji
Wura-Natasha Ogunji turns movement into testimony. Working across drawing, video, performance and installation, the Nigerian-American artist follows the rhythms of daily life in Lagos walking, working, waiting, carrying, looking and asks what it means for women to occupy public space with freedom and pleasure. Her performances are often spare but powerful: the body moves through the city carrying a private history, while the city becomes a stage for labour, leisure, visibility and refusal. Her drawings extend that inquiry through lines that suggest routes, bodies and accumulated gestures. Ogunji has been presented at Tate Modern, the Guggenheim, the Hirshhorn, the Brooklyn Museum, Palais de Tokyo, the São Paulo Biennial and the Lagos Biennial. Her honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Pollock-Krasner grant. Recent exhibitions include O Poder de Minhas Mãos at Sesc Pompeia. She makes ordinary action monumental: a walk, a trace, a pause, a woman taking up room.
48. Olu Amoda
Olu Amoda makes sculpture from the remains of modern life. Working with found metal, nails, industrial remnants, and clusters of discarded objects, the Nigerian artist transforms materials associated with labour, manufacture, and consumption into portraits, symbols, and monumental forms. In Tax Collector (Eye II), ordinary spoons become the surface of a large metal eye, turning an everyday utensil into a meditation on seeing, collecting and value. Born in Warri, Amoda studied at Auchi Polytechnic and Georgia Southern University. He has exhibited at the Museum of Arts and Design, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Dakar Biennale, and founded Riverside Art and Design Studios in Lagos. His sculptures are acts of conversion: industrial leftovers become memory, repeated objects become image, and the city’s debris becomes a new kind of monument.
49. Rom Isichei
Rom Isichei paints the emotional residue of ordinary life. Born in Asaba and based between Nigeria and the wider international art world, the artist works across painting, drawing, collage, assemblage and installation, using expressive, textured brushwork to turn the portrait into a space of feeling. His figures are recognisable but never fixed; faces seem to emerge from the paint as if memory were still deciding what to keep. These works bring the social and personal spheres together, turning everyday experience into a metaphor for intimacy, pressure, distance, and the stories people carry into public view. Trained at Yaba College of Technology and later educated at Chelsea College of Art and Design, Isichei has exhibited widely in Nigeria, the United States, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The Funmi Oyetunji Collection holds his work, and it continues to circulate through both institutional and private platforms.
50. Sam Ovraiti
Sam Ovraiti made watercolour impossible to dismiss as a minor language. Born in Zaria, the Nigerian painter developed a reputation for expressive colour, luminous washes and a willingness to let the medium lead the image. His paintings move between figurative observation, geometric fusion and abstraction, finding in watercolour and chalk pastel a range of moods from the immediacy of a human figure to the dissolving atmosphere of memory. Ovraiti earned an HND from Auchi Polytechnic and an MFA from the University of Benin, then spent years teaching at Auchi, where he helped train young artists. His relationship with Bruce Onobrakpeya and the Harmattan Workshop deepened his commitment to research and experimentation. As director of the Harmattan Workshop and founder of Artists Anchor Point, he continues to mentor through workshops and training. His achievement is visual and generational: he expanded colour on paper while building communities through which Nigerian painting keeps renewing itself.
51. Jerry Buhari
Jerry Buhari has spent a career turning observation into a language of memory. The Nigerian painter, sculptor, and academic works across oil, acrylic, enamel, and watercolour, drawing on Gwari forms, vegetation, landscape, and the shifting textures of Nigerian life. His paintings can be richly descriptive, but they are never simply records; colour and surface become ways of thinking about place, time and the human relationship to the natural world. A graduate and longtime teacher at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Buhari has helped shape both the practice and the study of contemporary Nigerian art. His work has travelled through exhibitions in Havana, Geneva, London, Liverpool, Malmö and New York, and has appeared in major surveys of African modernism. He has also edited and written on art, extending his practice into documentation and criticism.
52. Jimoh Buraimoh
Jimoh Buraimoh made beads speak in the language of modern painting. A pioneering figure of the Osogbo School, he transformed the Yoruba tradition of beadwork on crowns, regalia and ceremonial objects into a contemporary medium of colour, texture and storytelling. His bead paintings, mosaics, oils, and etchings are exuberant without being frivolous: figures, animals, spirits, and scenes from Yoruba life shimmer with movement and ceremony. Buraimoh’s 1997 mural The Elders, commissioned for Howell Park in Atlanta, received the city’s Award of Excellence for Best Mosaic Mural. The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art holds his work, and it has appeared in major exhibitions including Visions of Yoruba and A Concrete Vision: Oshogbo Art in the 1960s. He has taught internationally and continues to connect art-making with community and education. As Africa’s first bead painter, Buraimoh did more than invent a signature technique.
53. Demas Nwoko
Demas Nwoko is an artist who refuses to keep disciplines in separate rooms. Painter, sculptor, designer, theatre practitioner, writer, architect and master builder, he has spent more than six decades developing a Nigerian modernism grounded in local materials, indigenous forms and the imaginative possibilities of African space. As a founding member of the Zaria Art Society, he helped articulate the idea of natural synthesis: a modern art that could absorb global techniques without surrendering its cultural centre. His architecture, most famously the Dominican Institute in Ibadan and his New Culture Studios, makes sculpture, theatre and building part of the same language. In 2023, La Biennale di Venezia awarded him the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Architecture, recognising a body of work whose influence reaches far beyond its relatively small number of completed buildings. Nwoko’s legacy is architectural in the deepest sense.
54. Ozioma Onuzulike
Ozioma Onuzulike lets ceramics carry history without trapping it. The Enugu-based artist, poet, and academic works with clay, palm-kernel shells, iron oxide, and colourants to build textile-like structures that speak to colonialism, migration, trade, and the afterlives of violence. In his Palm Kernel Shell Beads series, discarded kernels and locally made ceramic beads evoke the entangled histories of commerce and enslavement while recalling the prestige of Igbo akwaete, Yoruba aso-oke and Ghanaian kente. In Chainmail, thousands of terracotta elements transform the idea of the chain into something closer to armour an image of survival, dignity and historical re-making. A first-class graduate of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Onuzulike is also a professor and Director of the university’s Institute of African Studies. The Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art, Cambridge, Princeton, and the Design Museum in Munich hold his work.
55. Nifemi Marcus-Bello
Nifemi Marcus-Bello designs objects that carry Lagos’s intelligence. The Nigerian industrial designer approaches furniture, products, and installations as cultural research, studying the informal systems, improvised tools, and material ingenuity that make the city work. His LM Stool, Selah Lamp and the portable handwashing station For the Community by the Community all begin with an everyday need or object, then transform it through close attention to form, use and local production. Developed with Lagos artisans during the pandemic, the handwashing station drew on the meruwa water carts of Nigerian streets and entered The Museum of Modern Art’s collection. Marcus-Bello’s Oríkì series extends this method into bronze, aluminium and copper, linking material transformation to memory, identity and praise poetry. His work has been presented at Design Miami, the Sharjah Architecture Triennale, the Denver Art Museum, the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam and MoMA.
56. Williams Chechet
Williams Chechet turns history into a living pop image. Born in Kano, raised in Kaduna, and based in Lagos, the artist and graphic designer draws on Northern Nigerian archives, Hausa iconography, traditional dress, horsemen, and historical figures, then collides them with vivid colour, digital manipulation, and the visual grammar of contemporary popular culture. His We Are The North series brought this approach into public view, transforming archival photographs into bold, emotionally charged compositions that honour memory without freezing it in nostalgia. Chechet’s practice moves comfortably between painting, collage, illustration, design and murals, with commissions for Hard Rock Café Lagos, MTV Base Africa and other public-facing spaces. His work has also entered commercial and music culture through album art and brand collaborations. The achievement is not just versatility; it is the ability to make Northern Nigerian history feel immediate to a new generation.
57. Diana Ejaita
Diana Ejaita draws with the confidence of someone who understands that simplicity can be dramatic. The Nigerian-Italian illustrator, artist, and textile designer creates images from bold blocks of colour, strong black-and-white contrast, and soft, tactile pattern, often placing women at the centre of scenes filled with dignity, humour, and quiet power. Her work spans editorial illustration, books, textiles, and personal art, carrying Nigerian and diasporic references into a visual language that feels contemporary, warm, and immediately recognisable. Ejaita’s first New Yorker cover, Iya ni Wura (Mother Is Gold), introduced her emotionally direct storytelling to an international audience. She has illustrated books including Kamau & Zuzu Find a Way and worked with publishers and cultural platforms in Europe, the United States and Nigeria. Based in Berlin and closely connected to Nigeria, she treats the page as a meeting place between places and generations.
58. Lakin Ogunbanwo
Lakin Ogunbanwo makes portraiture feel like a private performance. The Lagos-born photographer works at the intersection of fashion photography and classical portraiture, using shadow, drapery, foliage, and vibrant flat colour to create elegant, enigmatic, and quietly subversive images. His subjects often hold themselves deliberately at a distance from the camera, refusing the easy access portraiture can demand. Drawing on the traditions of African studio photography while expanding the contemporary African visual archive, Ogunbanwo’s pictures turn style into a language of identity, desire and self-possession. His work has been shown at LagosPhoto, Art X Lagos, 1-54 London, Sydney Contemporary and MIART Milan, and is held by the Smithsonian, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Wedge Collection in Toronto. He has been featured in The New Yorker and Vogue Italia and commissioned by the Victoria and Albert Museum and Galeries Lafayette Paris.
59. Amaize Ojeikere
Amaize Ojeikere is an artist, photographer and archivist working in the long shadow and brilliant light of J.D. ’Okhai Ojeikere’s photographic legacy. His practice has helped preserve, organise and bring new audiences to one of Nigeria’s most important visual archives: the Hairstyles series, FESTAC documentation, sartorial portraits and architectural studies through which his father recorded a changing country. Amaize’s work is not simply custodial. As a photographer himself, he carries the archive forward through an interest in movement, identity, memory and the ways images continue to shape a culture after the moment they record has passed. He has contributed to exhibitions, publications and conversations around the Ojeikere collection, including the ART X ICON programme and ART X Lagos’s 2025 discussion on the master photographer’s homecoming. Through the J.D. ’Okhai Ojeikere Foundation and related publishing projects, he has helped make the archive available for scholarship and public encounter.
60. Tokini Peterside-Schwebig
Tokini Peterside-Schwebig built a fair and, in the process, helped build cultural capital. As founder of ART X Lagos, she created West Africa’s pioneering international art fair and a platform where artists, galleries, collectors, and audiences could meet in Lagos on equal terms with the wider world. ART X has grown into an ecosystem of programmes, ART X Live!, ART X Prize, ART X Cinema, and ART X Talks, that extends beyond the fair’s physical dates to support music, film, emerging artists, and critical conversation. Peterside-Schwebig’s work is entrepreneurial, but its deeper force is cultural: she understood that visibility is infrastructure, and that a city’s creative identity must be made public before it can be recognised globally. With a law degree from the London School of Economics, an MBA from INSEAD and experience at LVMH and ALARA, she brings strategic fluency to a project driven by affection for Lagos.
61. Adenrele Sonariwo
Adenrele Sonariwo helped make the contemporary Nigerian gallery feel like a place of possibility. After training in accounting and multimedia communications, she returned to Nigeria and founded Rele Gallery, opening its first physical space in 2015. From Lagos to Los Angeles, Rele has developed a reputation for ambitious exhibitions, art advisory and artist development, bringing emerging and established practices into conversation with audiences at home and abroad. Sonariwo’s contribution is not only the exhibitions she has mounted, but the confidence she has placed in artists still becoming themselves. Rele’s programme has introduced audiences to distinctive voices, supported Young Contemporaries, and built a platform where experimentation meets serious attention. She has also worked through education, pop-ups and the Rele Arts Foundation to widen access to contemporary art. Sonariwo sees the gallery as more than a room where objects are sold.
62. Kayode Adegbola
Kayode Adegbola works at the meeting point of law, collecting and cultural memory. A lawyer, advisor and cultural entrepreneur, he has spent more than fifteen years supporting Nigerian artists, advising companies and institutions on collections and building the curatorial platform Adegbola Art Projects. His work is notable for its long view: he champions emerging practices while also bringing modernist and traditional Nigerian art back into public conversation. The Vault Artist Residency provides studio space for artists based in Lagos, while the Ibeji Project reflects his sustained interest in Yoruba twin carvings and their histories of meaning. In 2025, he opened Adegbola Gallery with Heroes Past, an exhibition marking Nigeria’s independence through works and archival material by artists including Ben Enwonwu and Uche Okeke. The gallery’s programme now connects Lagos to international fairs and exhibitions. Adegbola’s achievement is infrastructural and imaginative.
63. Kavita Chellaram
Kavita Chellaram helped give Nigeria’s art market a structure through which value could be seen, discussed and sustained. An art collector and founder of Arthouse Contemporary, she established one of West Africa’s most important auction platforms, creating greater transparency around prices and a secondary market for modern and contemporary art. Since its first auction in Lagos in 2008, Arthouse has presented works by figures including Ben Enwonwu, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Ablade Glover, Yusuf Grillo and Uche Okeke, bringing artists and collectors into a more visible relationship. Chellaram also founded the Arthouse Foundation, whose residency programme has supported artists through research, exchange and international exposure. Her commitment extends to institutions beyond the marketplace: she has served as a trustee of the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts and as a member of Tate Modern’s African Acquisition Committee. Chellaram’s legacy reminds us that collecting can be cultural stewardship.
64. Yemisi Shyllon
Prince Yemisi Shyllon has made collecting a public act. A collector, philanthropist, and entrepreneur, he began acquiring art as a university student and later built OYASAF, one of Nigeria’s largest private art collections, comprising thousands of artworks and an extensive photographic record of the country’s cultural festivals. His vision found its most powerful expression in the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art at Pan-Atlantic University, whose founding collection includes more than 1,000 works donated by Shyllon. The museum provides a space for research, education, and sustained public engagement, while the foundation supports artists, scholars, and curators working across the field. Shyllon has also endowed academic programmes, supported publications and donated public sculptures to institutions and civic spaces. His collection spans traditional, modern, and contemporary practice, but its meaning goes beyond accumulation.
65. Azu Nwagbogu
Azu Nwagbogu has spent two decades expanding the ways Africa can be seen. As founder and director of the African Artists’ Foundation and LagosPhoto Festival, he has built platforms for artists working across photography, contemporary art, ecology, social justice and the politics of representation. AAF’s exhibitions, residencies, workshops and National Art Competition have helped uncover and develop new Nigerian talent, while LagosPhoto has brought local and international photographers into ambitious conversations about the continent’s stories. Nwagbogu has also served as interim director and head curator of Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town and created Art Base Africa, a digital space for learning about contemporary African art and its diaspora. His curatorial practice is deeply concerned with decolonisation, restitution and the role of institutions in shaping public memory.
66. Jumoke Sanwo
Jumoke Sanwo is a storyteller who treats place as both subject and collaborator. Working across photography, film, video art and virtual reality, she explores how people experience space, time, memory and the afterlives of colonial systems. Her practice has taken her from a 45-day Invisible Borders road trip across Africa to the 56th Venice Biennale, from digital conservation of the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove to Lagos at Large, an immersive film that premiered at IDFA and was recognised by Forbes as one of the top extended-reality experiences of 2019. In Lagos, she founded the Revolving Art Incubator, a transdisciplinary space that has exhibited more than fifty artists and hosted talks, workshops and performances. Sanwo’s images are attentive to the local, but never enclosed by it; she uses what she calls glocalisation to place specific histories within larger global conversations. Her achievement is a rare combination of artistic curiosity and cultural infrastructure.
67. Aindrea Emelife
Aindrea Emelife brings scholarship, style, and public energy to art-historical writing. A Nigerian-British curator, art historian, author and broadcaster, she specialises in modern and contemporary art, with particular attention to colonial and decolonial histories, transnationalism and the politics of representation. She began writing for the Financial Times at twenty and has since built a career spanning criticism, exhibition-making, publishing, and television. Her exhibition Black Venus, first shown at Fotografiska New York, examined the long, complicated history of the Black woman in visual culture through the work of international artists. Tate published her first book, A Brief History of Protest Art, and she has curated and advised projects across museums, galleries, and private collections. Emelife has also served as curator-at-large for modern and contemporary art at the Edo Museum of West African Art.
68. Fikayo Adebajo
Fikayo Adebajo makes photographs that ask the viewer to look beyond the burden of representation. The London-based Nigerian artist, sociologist and magical realist works across photography, installation and public programming, creating images in which Black women and people of colour appear as full, complex subjects rather than symbols of absence or struggle. Her practice is guided by the Yoruba idea of ori inu, the inner head or inner knowing and by a belief in care, intuition, community and multiplicity as forms of knowledge. Adebajo invites sitters and viewers to become co-creators of what she calls an Otherwise Gaze: a way of seeing that begins with intimacy and moves towards other possible realities. Her work has appeared at Tate Modern, the Barbican, Whitechapel Gallery, Hypha Studios and LagosPhoto, and she has worked across public programmes at Tate Britain and Tate Modern. Adebajo’s images are generous without being soft.
69. Femi Akinsanya
Femi Akinsanya has built a collection that reads like a map of Nigerian memory. An investment banker, independent financial advisor and private equity investor, he has collected African art for decades, assembling a significant body of traditional, modern and contemporary work in Lagos. The traditional collection ranges across Yoruba, Igbo, Urhobo, Cross River, Benue and Edo histories, with sculptures in wood, bronze, brass, copper and iron that document the richness and changing forms of indigenous art. Alongside it sits a modern and contemporary collection featuring paintings, sculpture and works on paper by Nigerian artists and artists from beyond the country. Akinsanya has also made preservation part of the project, digitising portions of the collection and speaking publicly about the responsibility of keeping Nigerian art in Nigerian hands. His approach is not driven by fashion alone; it attends to lineage, material, ritual, and the life of an object across generations.
70. Yemi Ogunbiyi
Yemi Ogunbiyi has moved through Nigerian cultural life as a scholar, theatre thinker, journalist, publisher and institution-builder. Trained in English and Dramatic Literature at the University of Ibadan and New York University, he began in academia and theatre before joining Guardian Newspapers and later becoming Managing Director of Daily Times of Nigeria. His career has always carried an intellectual commitment to the arts: he taught drama, wrote about theatre and literature, supported publishing, and helped create platforms that let Nigerian ideas reach broad audiences. As founder and chairman of Tanus Communications and Tanus Books, he extended that work into media, education and public affairs. His books and essays include critical writing on Nigerian drama, literary culture and the country’s creative history. Ogunbiyi’s importance lies in the connections he made between disciplines that are too often separated.
71. Richard Vedelago
Richard Vedelago is building a cultural space that refuses to keep culture in separate compartments. As founder and director of Nahous in Lagos, he has created a multidisciplinary platform where visual art, photography, installation, fashion, design, sound and performance can meet the city’s social life. The project occupies a former Federal Palace Hotel wing associated with the memory of FESTAC ’77, giving the space a charged architectural history before the first exhibition even begins. Vedelago’s curatorial approach treats that history as a starting point rather than a limitation. Nahous presents established and emerging voices, balancing institutional seriousness with the immediacy of a living social environment. Its programme is an editorial calendar in motion: exhibitions, gatherings, collaborations, and encounters that let different creative communities cross-pollinate. Vedelago’s achievement is recognising that Lagos doesn’t experience culture in neat categories.
72. Titi Ogufere
Titi Ogufere has spent her career turning design into a force for cultural and economic imagination. A designer, publisher, educator, and cultural entrepreneur, she founded Design Week Lagos in 2019 as a citywide platform for architecture, interiors, product design, technology, craft, and contemporary African making. Through the Africa Design Network, she now leads an ecosystem that connects media, exhibitions, education, manufacturing and professional advocacy. Ogufere also founded the Interior Designers Association of Nigeria and the African Council for Interior Architects and Designers, and became the first African president of the International Federation of Interior Architects/Designers. She has published more than twenty-seven books and professional guides, and her documentaries include Made by Design and Mama Nike: Queen of Adire. Design Week Lagos has grown into a vital meeting point for makers and audiences, with programmes that connect Nigerian designers to global platforms such as Salone Satellite in Milan.
73. Kanyeyachukwu Tagbo-Okeke
Kanyeyachukwu Tagbo-Okeke makes colour feel like a declaration of possibility. The autistic Nigerian visual artist began painting as a child and developed a bold, expansive language of pattern, symbols, and saturated colour that communicates emotion beyond words. In 2024, at fifteen, he created Impossibility Is a Myth, a 12,303.87-square-metre painting that earned a Guinness World Record for the largest single-piece painting on canvas. The work’s infinity ribbon and expressive emojis turned an extraordinary artistic feat into a public statement about autism, acceptance and the scale of human potential. His exhibitions have included presentations at the Museum of Young Art and the OPEC Fund headquarters in Vienna, the UNICEF headquarters in New York and galleries in Nigeria. In 2026, he set a second Guinness World Record as the youngest person to cycle 100 miles, extending his advocacy beyond the canvas. Kanyeyachukwu’s art is joyful, direct and immense.
74. John Akande
John Akande paints African life with colour, rhythm and a generous eye. The Lagos-born figurative artist works across acrylic, oil and mixed media, blending expressionist energy with touches of realism to create scenes that feel both contemporary and emotionally grounded. Music, cartoons, everyday observation and the visual traditions of Lagos all enter his compositions, where bold colour carries as much narrative weight as the figure. Works such as Bond and Turmoil II, Cellist IV and Vigorous Mompreneur show an artist drawn to character, gesture and the many ways ordinary people occupy the frame. A Fine Arts graduate of Yaba College of Technology, Akande has exhibited in Nigeria and internationally, including at Art Basel Miami, Afrikin Art Fair, and in solo presentations in Lagos and Miami.
75. Chidi Ukwuoma
Chidi Ukwuoma builds images as vessels for memory. Working across ceramics, painting, photography, print-based processes, sculpture and sound, the interdisciplinary artist considers how objects and symbols carry history, transmit meaning and change as they move through time. His practice draws on mythology, ritual, music, material culture and inherited visual languages, shifting between representation and abstraction to make familiar forms feel newly charged. A photograph can become an echo; a ceramic object can hold the weight of a remembered place; a sound can turn repetition into a kind of archive. Ukwuoma’s work especially explores the relationship between the individual and society, and how cultural experience is stored not only in stories but in surfaces, gestures, and hand-made objects. Recent presentations in Los Angeles have included containing Matter and exhibitions at Art Share L.A. and Durden and Ray.
76. Somi Nwandu
Somi Nwandu is a Nigerian photographer and multidisciplinary visual artist whose work moves with ease between image-making, fashion, culture and new media. Born in Maryland and raised between Enugu and the United States, she brings a layered sense of place to photographs that investigate identity, memory, and how a life is performed. Her path has been unusually expansive: after studying fashion design, business management and marketing at the Fashion Institute of Technology, she worked with Tom Ford, Macy’s, Alexander Wang and Ruff ‘n’ Tumble before earning an MA in Global Creative and Cultural Industries from SOAS. Her photographic work has appeared at LagosPhoto, the Lagos Biennial, The Other Art Fair and Xposure Sharjah, while Makoko Loko: Life on the Water records the textures of life on Lagos’s waterways. Nwandu’s practice is a stylish, searching bridge between the studio, the street and the moving image.
77. Ofunne Azinge
Ofunne Azinge makes paintings that feel like rooms assembled from memory. The Nigerian-British artist combines oil, photography, and image transfer to layer personal archives, community photographs, and sitters’ faces into portraits that keep shifting between intimacy and history. Her work is shaped by the movement between more than eleven homes in Nigeria and the United Kingdom, and by a sustained interest in identity, post-colonial memory, representation, and women’s lives. After completing an MA in Painting at Manchester School of Art, Azinge received the Royal Academy’s Arts Club Award and was selected as a Curator’s Choice by Yinka Shonibare for the 2021 Summer Exhibition. Her exhibition history includes Tales for a Stranger, 1-54 London and her 2025 solo exhibition Home Is Where My Feet Land. Azinge’s images do not simply preserve a face; they show how belonging is layered, inherited and continually made.
78. Taslimah Woli
Taslimah Woli works at the charged intersection of architecture, photography and social observation. Trained as an architectural designer, she looks closely at how people inhabit built environments and how a religious space, a street corner, or a room can hold ritual, memory, and unspoken rules. Her projects Ritual Spaces and Silent Dialogue use photography as patient attention, letting the architecture around everyday life become part of the story. Woli was selected for the Rongo Art Residency’s 2026 documentary-photography cohort in Benin City and joined Open Arts’ 2026 research residency in Kaduna, where her focus on religious spaces extended her interest in the relationship between people and place. She has also participated in Many Trees, A Forest, an alternative curating workshop and exhibition. Woli’s work is quietly architectural: it reveals how communities adapt space and how space, in turn, shapes what communities can imagine.
79. Damilola Moses Opedun
Damilola Moses Opedun is a Lagos-based painter whose portraits carry the gravity of history without losing the pulse of the present. Born in Akure and trained in Art and Design at Auchi Polytechnic, where he graduated as the best student in Painting in 2010, Opedun works primarily in oil on canvas. His figures often appear in colonial-era clothing and carefully composed settings, creating a productive tension between old-master portraiture and the social realities of contemporary Nigeria. The paintings are elegant, but their elegance is never empty: they ask what power looks like, who gets remembered and how a person can claim dignity inside a difficult world. Opedun’s exhibitions include Beauty and the Beholder, Parallel and Self-Assertiveness, while his 2026 solo exhibition The Witness at TAFETA London extended his reach into an international gallery context.
80. Victoria Oniosun
Victoria Oniosun paints the inner weather of contemporary womanhood. Her canvases move between figuration and abstraction, using anonymous figures, luminous landscapes and thick, tactile strokes to explore femininity, memory, personal identity and the shared emotional worlds women inhabit. Born in Oyo State, Oniosun studied Fine and Applied Arts at Obafemi Awolowo University before completing an MA at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury. Her palette-knife paintings, such as For How Long and Silent Construction, make the surface itself feel psychological: colour gathers, breaks and returns like a thought that cannot quite settle. Oniosun won the 2024 MANI Art Competition and received the Lantern Art Space Fellowship that same year. Her work has since appeared at 1-54 New York, Art X Lagos, Scope Miami and other international platforms. She paints with tenderness, but never sentimentality.
81. Ayotunde Ojo
Ayotunde Ojo paints the rare luxury of being unguarded. His figures rest, recline, and occupy interiors with quiet authority, turning everyday pauses into reflections on intimacy, memory, and the politics of Black rest. Working across charcoal, pastel, oil and acrylic, Ojo began with highly realistic drawing before pandemic isolation pushed his practice toward the expressive possibilities of figurative painting. The result is a body of work in which gesture carries as much meaning as facial expression: a sleeping body, a bent arm or a turned head becomes an argument for tenderness. His debut solo exhibition, These Four Walls, opened at Southern Guild in Cape Town in 2024, followed by presentations with Tiwani Contemporary, Rele and other international galleries. Ojo has also undertaken residencies with Dida, Superzoom Paris and GUILD Cape Town. In 2026, A Life of Its Own extended his conversation with the figure.
82. Motunrayo Akinola
Motunrayo Akinola makes domestic life strange enough to be seen anew. The London-based British-Nigerian artist works with sculpture, installation, performance, sound and drawing, using ordinary materials and images from the home to ask difficult questions about comfort, migration, faith, belonging and the afterlives of colonialism. Raised between Lagos and London, Akinola understands the domestic not as a private retreat sealed off from history, but as a place where belief, memory and power are rehearsed every day. At the Royal Academy Schools, where she graduated in 2023, she developed a practice attentive to gesture, ritual and the objects that quietly organise a life. Her South London Gallery Postgraduate Residency led to Knees Kiss Ground, a project that brought installation, performance and sound into an intimate conversation with the body.
83. Adewale Kolawale John
Public gallery materials identify Adewale Kolawale John as John Kolawole Adewale, a Nigerian painter and draftsman born in 1996. His practice is powered by the relationship between music, memory and portraiture. Working in oil and acrylic on paper and canvas, he paints Yoruba musicians and their patrons in compositions alive with ankara, aso oke, damask, gold jewellery and the implied rhythm of performance. These are not simply portraits of musicians; they are images of a cultural world in which sound, dress, devotion, and communal memory remain inseparable. Adewale trained in Painting and Decoration at Government Technical College, Ibadan, and developed his studio there as both a place of work and a site of instruction for younger artists. A 2025 residency at G.A.S. Lagos took him into archives, record stores, cultural sites and the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove.
84. Chidinma Mordi
Chidinma Yemisi Mordi, known as CYRA, paints the exuberant intelligence of everyday Nigerian life. A self-taught artist and trained architect, she draws from markets, salons, family rituals, weddings, and the street’s visual abundance, translating lived experience into acrylic, ink, collage, and her signature gold-patterned “Afro-Mandala” language. Her paintings are joyful without being lightweight: beneath the colour lies a sustained interest in cultural memory, personal resilience, and how architecture and ornament can preserve identity. Works such as Saturday Morning and Stay Soft show her ability to make a small, familiar scene feel both deeply personal and broadly recognisable. Mordi has exhibited in Nigeria and internationally, including London, and was selected for RMB Latitudes’ 2026 Nigeria Focus, a programme that connected Nigerian artists with wider African audiences. Her practice carries the confidence of someone who knows that beauty can be a form of knowledge.
85. Ezekiel Osunala
Ezekiel Osunala designs objects that carry Lagos in their silhouette. His Eyo Lamp, highlighted at Design Week Lagos, takes its cue from the flowing garments and visual drama of the city’s Eyo masquerade, turning a cultural reference into a functional light source. The design is striking because it does not treat tradition as a surface to decorate a product after the fact. Instead, the movement, volume, and presence associated with Eyo become part of the lamp’s formal logic, letting heritage shape how the object stands, glows, and occupies a room. Osunala belongs to a generation of Nigerian designers interested in the intelligence of local forms: what they can teach about movement, ceremony, material and public life. His work sits within the growing conversation around contemporary African design, where furniture, lighting, and objects are being developed as serious cultural propositions.
86. Utubor Shadrach Melvin
Utubor Shadrach Melvin paints figures who seem to carry conversations they have not yet spoken aloud. Using expressive brushwork, bold colour, and a keen sense of movement, he explores spirituality, emotion, gender, and identity through bodies never reduced to perfect outlines. His subjects appear tense, contemplative, or quietly luminous, inhabiting the space between private feeling and public form. Utubor holds a National Diploma in General Art and a Higher National Diploma in Painting from Yaba College of Technology, and was mentored by the painter and draughtsman Edosa Oguigo. Recent presentations include the Ecobank Lagos Pop-Up Museum, Mydrim Affordable Art Exhibition, the CraftVantage Emerging Artist Exhibition, and Deep Blue in 2026. Works such as Dancing Queens, What We Carry, and the Obiageri paintings show an artist increasingly confident in figuration’s emotional possibilities. Utubor’s canvases do not ask the figure to explain everything.
87. Ayoola Gbolahan
Ayoola Gbolahan is a Lagos-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice treats culture as something felt in the body, remembered through objects and continually remade. Born in Ibadan in 1977, he studied Fine and Applied Arts at Obafemi Awolowo University and has spent more than two decades working across painting, sculpture, installation, and mixed media. His work draws on human behaviour, anthropology, spirituality, archaeology, and history, using acrylic, pastel, charcoal, lead, bronze, earth, wood, canvas, linen, and paper to build figures that feel both ancestral and contemporary. The Re-Agents: Amplified, his 2023 solo exhibition, presented bold works on paper shaped by questions of African identity, migration, economic pressure and cultural ownership. In 2025, he exhibited at 1-54 London, while recent works such as Luwoo’s Mirror; Wisdom in a Woman’s Hand and Keeper of Lineage continue his interest in memory and inheritance.
88. Oluwatobi Adewumi
Oluwatobi Adewumi makes portraits that carry the emotional weight of migration. Born in Nigeria and now based in Arkansas, the contemporary artist works across charcoal, acrylic, and mixed-media drawing, layering figures, facial expressions, clothing, and symbolic objects into stories about belonging, assimilation, resilience, and cultural memory. His images are often constructed like stories within stories: the face holds one history, the garment another, and the surrounding marks suggest the pressure of the society through which the subject is moving. Adewumi’s practice is grounded in navigating American culture while refusing to let Nigerian heritage become a lost language. His works have been shown in galleries and institutions in the United States, and his 2026 eight-week James Castle House residency in Boise gave him a new setting to work with found materials and personal archives of photographs, documents, textiles, and ephemera.
89. Tobi Onabolu
Tobi Onabolu approaches art as a living process rather than a collection of isolated objects. Working across moving image, performance, writing, photography, installation and immersive environments, the artist draws from African cosmologies, psychology and embodied knowledge to explore inner experience and collective structures. Feeling, dreaming, sensing and living become four connected states in a practice that is as interested in breath, movement, and attention as it is in the finished image. Onabolu’s film and performance work includes Dear Black Child, which won Best Score at the 2022 Cannes Indie Shorts Awards, and the continuing project Finding Etherea. He also founded the artist retreat Finding Etherea and serves as artistic director of Lọpọ Lọpọ, a contemporary art festival based in Grand Popo. In 2025, he won the Aesthetica Art Prize, and in 2026, his work appeared at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art and Cinedans at the Eye Film Museum.
90. Tolu Aliki
Tolu Aliki has built a career from looking closely at ordinary life and giving it extraordinary colour. A Nigerian figurative painter and sculptor, he creates stylised portraits of people in social settings, using oil pastel and acrylic to enlarge facial expression, clothing, gesture and the small props that make a scene feel lived in. His figures are monumental not only in scale but in character: they arrive with humour, desire, family histories and the drama of daily interaction already written across them. Aliki’s subjects inhabit a world of music, love, politics, cultural tension and domestic familiarity, and his bold palette lets those forces share the same frame. His work has circulated through exhibitions in Nigeria, Ethiopia and the United States, including Art in the Bank and Art for Peace at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
91. Olamide Ogunade
Olamide Ogunade, known as Olisco, paints Black skin, pressure and persistence with a remarkable mixture of precision and tenderness. Working across charcoal, graphite, acrylic, oil and pencil, he combines detailed figurative drawing with vivid colour and the floating bubbles that have become his signature. The bubbles are more than a visual motif: they suggest pressure, release and the temporary nature of the obstacles his subjects move through. Ogunade draws on his Lagos surroundings and the broader emotional life of African society, painting portraits of friends, neighbours, and imagined companions whose expressions carry both fatigue and hope. A Fine Art graduate of Yaba College of Technology, he has exhibited internationally at Frieze, the Armoury Show, and galleries in London, Cape Town, Berlin, and beyond. Works such as Clouded Mind, Ever Ready and Secret Admirer show how far the language has travelled.
92. Adeoti Azeez Afeez
Adeoti Azeez Afeez is a Nigerian ceramicist who lets clay reveal what a surface tries to hide. His signature graffiti technique involves scratching through an engobe-coated surface to expose contrasting colour, producing hatched drawings with the depth and intensity of a portrait. Born and raised in Lagos with roots in Oyo State, Adeoti draws on Yoruba craftsmanship, facial expression and cultural memory while pushing ceramics towards a contemporary visual language. He graduated from Yaba College of Technology as the top student in his programme, and his work has appeared in Beyond Limit, Stay Black & Die, Reversed Safari, and international ceramics exhibitions. In 2025, his solo exhibition HERE…STILL brought Yoruba royalty and lineage into a conversation with colour, texture, and form. In 2026, he was selected for Common Ground, a major international ceramics exhibition in Delft, and worked with local studios and communities through workshops.
93. Hanson Okere
Hanson Okere has made fire a drawing instrument. The Rivers State-born, Lagos-based artist works in pyrography, using heat, razor blades and wood to create intricate figurative images in which scorched surfaces become skin, shadow, memory and atmosphere. His portraits are highly detailed, but the real drama lies in the material: wood carries nature’s trace, while fire marks the image with destruction, revelation, and time. Okere studied at the University of Port Harcourt and was selected for the Rele Arts Foundation Residency in 2022, where he deepened his exploration of negative space and scorched texture. His first solo exhibition, Flames of Nostalgia, followed at Rele Gallery in 2024, bringing memory, loss and the persistence of the past into a haunting visual register. A Pioneer Works residency in New York, running through 2026, has opened a new chapter in his practice with the series Between Light and Obscurity.
94. Ife Olowo
Ifeoluwa Oluwaseun Olowu, professionally known as Ife Olowu, is a Nigerian visual artist, art writer and digital innovation specialist exploring the intersection of contemporary African storytelling, painting and technology. A graduate of the University of Lagos, where he studied Painting, his artistic practice draws inspiration from his early exposure to textile art and his interest in the relationship between culture, identity and technology. He works across expressionist painting, digital storytelling and augmented reality (AR), creating interactive experiences that allow traditional artworks to extend beyond the canvas. His Colored Reality collection, which has been exhibited internationally, explores how technology can reshape the way audiences engage with visual art. Through his multidisciplinary practice, Olowu challenges conventional boundaries between traditional artistic expression and emerging digital possibilities.
95. Eniwaye Oluwaseyi
Eniwaye Oluwaseyi paints people as they are remembered: present, absent, layered and never entirely still. Born in Kogi State, he studied Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering before teaching himself to move from charcoal and graphite into oil and acrylic. His impressionistic realism uses bold colour and visible brushwork to place Black bodies inside psychologically charged interiors, where personal history meets questions of race, class, politics and belonging. His early solo exhibition, The Politics of Shared Spaces, established a concern with the power struggles embedded in everyday environments; later work expanded that inquiry through family photographs, domestic spaces, and the unstable experience of moving between Nigeria and the Netherlands. Oluwaseyi completed a residency at the Rijksakademie and in 2025 received the Royal Award for Modern Painting from King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands. In 2026, Buried Roots Up in the Air brought his layered interiors to Zidoun-Bossuyt.
96. Sanjo Lawal
Sanjo Lawal makes photographs that refuse to stay inside the frame. The Lagos-based photographer and multidisciplinary artist combines photography with painting, collage, installation, and recycled materials to create portraits in which colour, texture, and spiritual symbolism matter as much as the camera’s record. His visual language grew from an early habit of drawing and painting, from photographing his environment with a phone and from a close attention to the colours his mother brought into daily life through fabrics and flowers. Lawal studied Fine Art at Yaba College of Technology and has developed a practice rooted in Nigerian urban life, cultural difference, community and the imagination of the self. His solo exhibition Heavy Is the Head at This Is Not a White Cube in Lisbon, presented in 2025, brought together seventeen previously unseen works made between 2022 and 2025. Earlier exhibitions included Embodied Narratives and Journeys.
97. Bali Audu
Bali Audu builds portraits from colour, pattern, and the quiet pressure of lived experience. The Lagos-based Nigerian artist works primarily in acrylic on canvas, using a Henna-inspired dot language to layer symbolism across scenes about resilience, identity, self-discovery and the emotional complexity of everyday life. Her background in Textile Arts at the University of Lagos continues to shape the practice: texture, ornament and the rhythm of repeated marks give each image a tactile, almost woven energy. Audu transitioned fully into studio practice in 2022, and her work has since appeared in local and international exhibitions, including a 2025 contemporary auction at Signature Art Gallery. Pieces such as In the Maze 2 show how she turns decorative intensity into narrative space; the dots are not surface alone, but a pulse running through the painting.
98. Matthew Imuetiyan Eguavoen
Matthew Imuetiyan Eguavoen is a Lagos-based painter and photographer who makes the pressures of Nigerian life visible without surrendering his subjects’ humanity. Born in Edo State, he studied Civil Engineering and Structures at the University of Port Harcourt before choosing to pursue art through self-study in his final year. His paintings combine oil, acrylic, charcoal, and graphite to create figurative portraits that address identity, mental health, gender, colonial inheritance, and the social, economic, and political forces that shape survival. Exhibitions such as Egbé Okpá and Ukhurhę, both presented with AFIKARIS, brought intimate portraits and the spiritual language of Edo to an international audience; his work has also appeared at Art X Lagos, AKAA, 1-54 Paris, Expo Chicago, and Volta New York. In 2025, he continued exhibiting internationally, and in 2026 he was included in Land That Raised Us, a group exhibition on land and masculine identity.
99. Yinka Shonibare
Yinka Shonibare is a British-Nigerian artist whose work explores colonialism, migration, cultural identity and the relationship between Africa and Europe. Born in London in 1962, he grew up in Lagos before returning to the United Kingdom to study art at the Byam Shaw School of Art and Goldsmiths, University of London. Working across sculpture, photography, film and installation, he is renowned for using brightly patterned Dutch wax-print fabrics to challenge conventional ideas of cultural identity and colonial history. His notable works include Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, displayed on London’s Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth in 2010, and The British Library, which examines immigration and national belonging. Nominated for the Turner Prize in 2004, Shonibare was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2019. He also founded the Guest Artists Space Foundation in Nigeria to support artistic exchange and creative practice.
100. Dimeji Onafuwa
Dimeji Onafuwa is a Nigerian-born visual artist and design researcher whose expressive paintings explore identity, migration, cultural assimilation and belonging. Based in the United States, he draws inspiration from his Nigerian heritage and experiences in America to examine the complexities of navigating different cultures. He studied art and design at Concord University, then earned an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a PhD in Design from Carnegie Mellon University in 2018. His artistic practice combines bold colours, simplified forms, and expressive compositions, influenced by Yoruba aesthetics, Henri Matisse and the Bay Area figurative expressionist movement. His exhibitions include Oju Ona, Ila and Identity, a 2021 dual exhibition at Sozo Gallery in Charlotte. In 2024, Common Boundaries continued his exploration of cultural identity and human experience. Through his work, Onafuwa examines how people preserve their cultural histories while adapting to new environments.
