Slawn turns up to our interview in his London studio two hours late and holding his two-week-old son under his arm like a rugby ball. Dressed in a black T-shirt, shorts and work boots, the 23-year-old Nigerian (real name Olaolu Akeredolu-Ale) looks like a well-dressed scaffolder on his lunch break. In actual fact, he’s the art world’s latest, and most in-demand, enfant terrible.
The Lagosian mixes skating’s bravado and street art’s break-the-rules approach and is having a lot of success doing it. He claims he’s already made £1m, and this afternoon – 24 hours before the launch of a show at his new gallery, Saatchi Yates sandwiched between Pall Mall and Mayfair – Slawn has been spending some of it.
“I went to get her a push present,” he says, when I ask him why he was held up – nodding towards Tallula Christie, his partner, who is entertaining their eldest, a toddler called Beau who is quietly watching an episode of Twirlywoos on an iPhone. “Yeah, I picked up a £10,000 watch.
“I should go buy a dress for you,” he adds, talking to Christie, who is trying to get their newborn son settled and fed after taking him off Slawn. “Something really expensive and then I’ll spray it and fuck it all up.”
If the spray-painted dress idea sounds like idle bragging, it’s worth pointing out that during the show’s opening the following night, Slawn heads out into the street to spraypaint a London black cab. There’s impulsive, and then there’s Slawn, who hasn’t stopped since he landed in London from Lagos in 2017. His trademark is big caricature faces, spray painted (“I’m too lazy to pick up a brush”), often with oversized red lips that sit somewhere between Keith Haring’s paintings and Robert Crumb’s most outrageous characters.
His collaborations with brands have taken him into the mainstream, where few fine art practitioners have ventured. Everyone from Dr Martens and Converse to Timberland and Louis Vuitton (the late Virgil Abloh was an early fan) has courted him, while he also redesigned the FA Cup and created the 2023 Brit Awards statue. He’s modelled for Supreme, and was on the cover of i-D magazine in 2019 when they sent in-demand photographer Tyler Mitchell to shoot him alongside Leo “Soldier” and Onyedi – his two partners in the streetwear brand Motherlan – at Lagosian surf spot, Tarkwa Bay.
It’s not just brands, either. Channel 4 recently collaborated with him on a satirical documentary where Slawn attempted to auction his first-born son, Beau (who Christie and Slawn also named their buzzy cafe/art space after). Whatever Slawn is involved in there’s an undercurrent of anarchism but it’s all propped up by a serious work ethic.
While I’m waiting for him to arrive, a representative from the gallery shows me a video clip of him creating the set piece work that spans the full length of Saatchi Yates’ longest wall. It’s made up of 1,000 rectangular pieces which Slawn first painted in a colour gradient that bleeds from orange into reds and eventually deep blues. Then he hand-sprayed 1,000 faces. The whole thing took him eight hours, and now the pieces are being sold for £1,000 each.
Slawn believes his success comes from two things: sleeping (“I have a nap, and when I wake up, I have the best idea in the world”) and writing letters to his future self. He digs one out from a corner of his studio, which is covered in empty Hennessy bottles and mock-up designs for Motherlan.
The letter reads: “You should always be Slawn: never stop, fast, gas on the pedal always. This is a letter to Olaolu in the future. I hope you’re doing good and your kids are OK. It is August 2024. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next couple years. I know you want to be the biggest artist in the world. Strive hard, never back down from a challenge. I know you can do it.”
“That’s the nicest thing I’ve ever heard you say,” says one of the artists who shares his studio space.
His private process might be powered by manifesting, but his public style (cocky, controversial, commercial) reeks of the Young British Artist era of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, and just like them it’s Saatchi hawking his wares. There’s also more than a hint of Jean-Michel Basquiat about Slawn. Not only the graffiti origins of his work, but also the vagueness and contradictions of his origin story.
Basquiat created a myth about himself being a Haitian-Puerto Rican street kid prodigy who slept on benches in Tompkins Square Park. While he might have been homeless at times, he also grew up in a Prospect Park brownstone, went to private school and knew MoMA inside out. Like Basquiat, Slawn has told reporters about his down-and-out existence in Lagos before he was “discovered” by the British grime MC Skepta while working in a Lagosian skate shop and encouraged to move to London.
But while he might have slept at friends’ houses and in cars, he also went to the exclusive Greenwood House school in the bougie Lagos suburb of Ikoyi, and mixed with other Nigerian tastemakers such as fashion designers Mowalola Ogunlesi and Ola Badiru. “Yeah, it’s a bit of an expensive one,” he says, sheepishly of his old school. “That’s where I was when things were still straight.” (Slawn has previously said he came from a wealthy family but then things went dramatically wrong, and he ended up sleeping in a car at one point.) “To be honest, I spent a lot of my time in primary school in the office, where you go if you haven’t paid your fees.”
So what’s the real story? Is he a nepo baby as some have claimed? “My mom is just enjoying her life, man,” he says. “A huge percentage of my earnings go towards my mother. So she’s chill.” What does she do, I ask? “My mom sells pots,” he deadpans. “My dad? I’m still trying to find out … he sells gold,” he adds, before a long pause. “I’m the breadwinner.”
One established fact about Slawn is that he came to London as a 17-year-old, setting up in Old Street in a chaotic flatshare with 10 other people. “We had parties every other day. There was an art shop close to my house, and I went there and picked up canvases every time and came back and painted. My house literally looked like that,” he says, pointing to the rows on canvas on the floor of the studio. “Just filled with paintings and shit.”
It was there that Slawn learned the potential of his art. “Then somebody was like, ‘Oh, I’ll give you a gram of cocaine for one of these’. That’s when I realised it had monetary value.”
While he might be valued in London, Slawn says a lot of the vitriol he receives is from the Nigerian art world, which is growing into one of the most interesting cultural hot spots in the world.
His Nigerian critics say he’s talentless, a chancer. “They hate me,” says Slawn. “It’s just natural for Nigerians to not like something they don’t understand, and also to hate someone they feel that doesn’t deserve it. Because I don’t post my work process. I only post what has come from it or the actual result. So they’re like, ‘Oh, this guy’s like, he’s got rich parents’. I just work a lot, I don’t stop working.”
Slawn’s launch party shows the fruits of his hard work. It’s rammed, with the streets around Saatchi Yates full of skaters, artists and fashionistas. Is this part of Slawn’s dream about becoming the world’s biggest artist?
“It’s not about being the biggest artist,” he says, contradicting his letter. “It’s about being the biggest in anything I’m doing. I want to do things 100%, so as soon as art started clicking for me, I was like, ‘Yeah, I want to see this to the end’. It’s like a game. Life is like a game.”
I Present to You Slawn is at Saatchi Yates, London, until 20 October.
