Sotheby's, 2022 — Nine Works and One Criterion

When Sotheby's invited Skepta to guest-curate a selection for their Contemporary Curated sale in London, he chose nine works. He did not describe his selection in the language of the market — not in terms of artists' trajectories, auction records, critical validation or investment potential. He described it in the language of feeling.

"I chose these pieces because, to me, they all had an African feeling about them. Whether they were created by African artists or not, they all share in this essence — be it the work's texture, colour or subject matter. And, in one way or another, they triggered powerful dialogues with my painting too."

African feeling. The phrase is deceptively simple. It contains within it a curatorial methodology that most institutional curators would struggle to articulate with the same clarity: that Africanness in visual art is not a matter of geography or biography but of aesthetic essence — something present in the texture, the colour, the subject matter, the relationship between elements on a surface. Something that can be recognised across artists of different origins, different traditions, different market positions, because it is a quality of the work itself rather than a credential of the maker.

The nine works he selected demonstrate what he means. A surrealist portrait by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye — British-Ghanaian, working in figurative painting of invented Black subjects. A densely textured Abstract Expressionist painting by Frank Bowling — Guyanese-British, one of the most significant abstract painters of the 20th century. A kaleidoscopic canvas by Ouattara Watts — Ivorian, the artist who came to New York in the 1980s after Jean-Michel Basquiat convinced him to make the move, and who in some ways gave rise to African Art in New York's awareness during that decade. A work by Theaster Gates — African American, incorporating repurposed materials from shuttered Black businesses as both art and social argument. A portrait by Ghanaian artist Aplerh-Doku Borlabi, made from coconut sheaths and acrylic. Spray-painted pieces by Slawn and Chito. A work by Omar Ba.

The selection is not a canon. It is a conversation — nine works that speak to each other across geography, generation and medium because they share something that Skepta has been trained to recognise from childhood.

The Education That Preceded the Collection

Skepta visits Nigeria regularly, almost always returning with art in tow. This is not a wealthy collector's acquisition strategy. It is a continuation of something that began before he had money, before he had a stage name, before he had access to auction houses.

The walls of the childhood home in Tottenham were his first education. Nigerian art — specifically, the visual culture that his parents carried with them from Lagos to London — shaped his eye before any museum, any gallery, any curriculum had the chance to intervene. This is the education that most art institutions do not know how to account for: the education that happens in domestic space, in the objects a family chooses to live with, in the visual environment that a child absorbs before they have aesthetic theory.

Edvard Munch's The Scream is among his favourite paintings. Album artwork by Tupac Shakur, Pink Floyd and Queen has shaped his visual thinking. But it is Nigerian art that Skepta cites as his primary inspiration — not as a category he has arrived at through critical reading, but as a living tradition that he has been inside since before he could articulate what it was.

This is a collecting origin story that is fundamentally different from the institutional narratives of most major collectors. It does not begin with a revelation in a gallery, with a mentor who opened a door, with a particular acquisition that changed everything. It begins with a house in Tottenham and parents who brought something from Lagos and hung it on the walls and let their son live inside it.

What "African Feeling" Actually Means

The phrase deserves more attention than it has received.

When Skepta says that his Sotheby's selections all had an African feeling — "whether they were created by African artists or not" — he is making a philosophical claim about how Africanness operates in visual art. It is not a matter of ethnicity or nationality. It is a quality of the work: something in the texture, the colour, the way subject matter is approached, the relationship between figuration and abstraction, the weight and density of surface.

This is, in formal terms, a claim about aesthetic essence — the idea that a set of visual works can share a defining quality that transcends the biographical circumstances of their makers. It is also, less formally, the description of what a child learns when they grow up surrounded by a specific visual tradition: the ability to recognise its qualities in unexpected places, to find the African feeling in a Frank Bowling abstraction or a Lynette Yiadom-Boakye portrait that might not, at first glance, announce itself as African art.

The Sotheby's selection also included works that spoke to the Nigerian specificity of his own practice. Ouattara Watts, who Basquiat drew to New York and who has been working at the intersection of African spiritual traditions and Western painting for four decades. Frank Bowling, whose dense chromatic surfaces carry a Caribbean and West African chromatic logic that is audible, once you have been trained to hear it, in the way colour accumulates and resists resolution. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, whose portraits of invented Black subjects insist on a quality of presence and specificity that is, for Skepta, recognisably related to the portraiture tradition he first encountered on the walls of his parents' home.

The Collector as Cultural Custodian

There is a strand of collecting philosophy that is about stewardship rather than investment — about ensuring that specific works are held in environments that understand their cultural weight, rather than simply in environments that can afford them.

Skepta's collecting practice, as far as it is visible, belongs to this strand. When he selects works for the Sotheby's sale, he is not primarily making market arguments. He is making cultural ones. He is saying: these works share a quality that I recognise and that I want others to recognise. He is acting as a translator between a visual tradition he has lived inside and an institutional space — the auction house — that has historically been indifferent or hostile to that tradition's full complexity.

This is the collecting philosophy that the African art world most urgently needs: not wealthy collectors who buy African art as a statement of cultural identity or as an investment in an emerging market, but collectors who have the eye — trained from childhood, by living inside a tradition — to recognise what is significant and to be able to say, with precision, why.

"African feeling" sounds like a vague criterion. In Skepta's hands, it is the opposite: a precise description of what he is looking for, rooted in thirty years of visual education that no art school provided.

Conclusion

Joseph Junior Adenuga walks into auction houses and galleries with an eye that was formed in a house in Tottenham, on walls that his parents brought from Lagos. He has a Nigerian chieftaincy title — Amuludun of Odo-Aje, conferred in April 2018. He returns to Nigeria regularly and comes home with art.

The collection he is building — piece by piece, in the language of feeling rather than the language of the market — is a continuation of the domestic visual education that preceded everything else. The chieftaincy. The Mercury Prize. The Nike collaborations. The Sotheby's curation. All of it grows from the same root: a child in Tottenham, surrounded by Nigerian art, learning to see.

That seeing is the collection. Everything else is what it produces.


Photo Credit:

© Sotheby’s (2022) / Contemporary Art Exhibition with Skepta