Paul Ayihawu

"For Paul Ayihawu, art is an extension of breath - a visual language through which his deepest emotions find space and form. In his practice, he explores the human form as a vessel for psychological depth, capturing fleeting emotional states and posing a quiet, insistent question:
How do we feel a sense of belonging in a world that continuously tells us we are not enough?

Paul is drawn to the overlooked - the familiar rhythms of neighbourhood life, the unspoken beauty in mundane gestures, and the joyful chaos of local exuberance. These everyday scenes evoke in him a profound sense of nostalgia, where memory is preserved not in grand narratives but in fragments of lived experience.

He works primarily with charcoal and acrylic, favouring the delicacy of flesh tones rendered in charcoal, while surrounding elements are brought to life with vibrant colour. His figures often inhabit abstract, feathered backgrounds - imagined spaces that echo ancestral memory and cultural dreamscapes.

Paul’s art is both meditation and activism. His work stands as a personal yet political gesture - a quiet form of resistance and reclamation, challenging dominant narratives while affirming the layered, evolving truth of African identity."

MEET

Paul Ayihawu

Paul Ayihawu is a contemporary Nigerian artist whose figurative works blend charcoal and acrylic to explore the complexity of African identity in a postcolonial world. Based in Nigeria, his practice challenges dominant narratives and reclaims the Black experience through poetic portraiture that merges traditional African textiles with Western influences.

At the heart of Ayihawu’s work is an investigation of cultural hybridity, socio-political memory, and transformation. His portraits — often inverted or recontextualised — depict Black subjects in a symbolic fusion of ankara fabrics and Western dress, reflecting on how African values and self-perception continue to evolve in the wake of colonial impact.

With a quiet yet powerful visual language, Paul honours the unseen, unheard, and untold stories of the African diaspora. His artworks serve as a space of reflection and empowerment, inviting viewers to engage deeply with the nuances of Black identity, resistance, and continuity.

Ayihawu’s work has been acquired by collectors in the USA, South Africa, Ghana, and Nigeria, contributing to a growing global discourse on the importance of African perspectives in contemporary art.

FROM OUR BLOGUE

The African Feeling — Skepta as Collector of Black & African Art

Joseph Junior Adenuga grew up in Tottenham, North London, in a home where Nigerian art lined the walls. His parents brought it from Lagos. He absorbed it before he had a word for what it was doing to him.

Today, as Skepta — one of the most significant British-Nigerian artists of his generation — he returns to Nigeria regularly, almost always coming back with art. In 2022 he guest-curated a collection at Sotheby's, selecting nine works he described with a single phrase: "they all had an African feeling about them."

This essay examines what that phrase means, where it comes from, and why Skepta's collecting philosophy is one of the most honest accounts of how African art actually lives in Black diasporic life.

Soulful Elegance — Lenny Kravitz as Black Artist & Designer

Most people know Lenny Kravitz as a rock star. Fewer know that he founded a design studio in 2003, has designed interiors across New York, designed a custom piano with Steinway, launched three collections with CB2, collaborated with Ray-Ban and YSL, directed his own music videos, and built a visual identity over five decades that is as deliberate and as African as anything he has ever recorded.

This essay examines Lenny Kravitz as a total creative practitioner — musician, designer, photographer, style icon — and argues that the African dimension of his visual practice has been the engine of everything, consistently underread and consistently present.

The House That Ancestors Built — Lenny Kravitz & African Art

Lenny Kravitz owns homes in Paris, the Bahamas, Brazil, New York and Miami. The one he talks about most is the Paris townhouse he named after his mother — Hôtel de Roxie. Inside it: a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting standing next to a custom Steinway piano with African carvings. African sculptures next to Warhol lithographs. Photographs of his ancestors framed by the same framer that works for the Louvre.

"This house continually pays tribute to my ancestors," Kravitz told Architectural Digest in April 2025. "All of this photography tells a story throughout the house through Black history, American and African."

This essay examines what Kravitz's collection reveals about the relationship between identity, inheritance and the deliberate act of surrounding yourself with the art of your ancestors.

Thirty Years Out Loud — What Jay-Z in 8 Actually Reveals

For thirty years, Shawn Carter kept the space between a lyric and its meaning as private property. Part of the pleasure of a Jay-Z verse was always the withholding — the flex, the reference landing half a second late, the boast that turned out to be a confession.

In JAŸ-Z in 8, he sits across a plain table from Rick Rubin in an empty chamber at the Palais Brongniart in Paris and starts doing that math out loud. Eight episodes. Eight albums. Thirty years of lyrics examined song by song, in stark black and white, by one of the most guarded artists in the history of popular music.

This essay examines what the documentary reveals, what it withholds, and why it matters as a document of Black creative authorship at the highest level.

The Unfinished Man — What Jay-Z Sees in Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat died at 27. Jay-Z is one of the most powerful men in the music and art world. They never met. And yet the conversation between them — across lyrics, collections, Halloween costumes and auction rooms — is one of the most revealing cultural dialogues of the last thirty years.

This essay traces what Jay-Z sees in Basquiat, what Basquiat's ghost sees back, and why the mirror between two Black men who rewrote the rules of worlds that were not built for them matters far beyond the art market.

The Artist Gets Paid — Swizz Beatz, Alicia Keys & the Royalty Revolution

The art market has a problem it has refused to solve for decades. When a painting sells at auction for millions, the artist receives nothing. The collector profits. The auction house takes its commission. The person who made the work watches from the room.

In 2018, Kerry James Marshall's Past Times sold for $21 million at Sotheby's. Marshall — one of the most significant painters working today — did not see a cent of it.

Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys have been thinking about this ever since. As musicians, they understand royalties. As collectors of Black art, they understand what the secondary market extracts and who it leaves behind. Their new initiative with Bonhams — The Deans' Choice — gives consignors the option to direct a percentage of the hammer price to the artist. Bonhams will match it.

It is not a complete solution. But in a market that has resisted change for fifty years, it is a beginning.

Casa Ferreirinha & Afrikanizm Art Debut at Angola's Big Bottle Week

Last year, for their debut at Big Bottle Week in Luanda, Sogrape, Casa Ferreirinha and Afrikanizm Art joined forces in a one-of-a-kind collaboration. The highlight? Artistically transformed wine bottles by the Dombele brothers—turning glass into canvas, and wine into cultural narrative.