How Anthony Azekwoh Is Pushing the Boundaries of What It Means to Be a Digital Artist

Anthony Azekwoh was in the middle of an examination when he resolved that he was in the wrong place. At the time, the multidisciplinary Nigerian artist was studying chemical engineering at a private university in Nigeria and was perpetually restless. He had found himself in the eternal struggle of being caught between studying a course he hated and fully committing to an art career that was already blooming. 

"It just wasn't working out. You know when you're just in this space you're not meant to be, and at the same time this art thing was taking off,” Azekwoh tells OkayAfrica. “Lecturers are asking me what I'm doing here. I'm asking my dad what I'm doing here. I'm all just confused. And I feel like I had to make that first step and go, ‘you know what? This isn't working.’”

And so halfway through writing that exam, Azekwoh stood up, left the hall, and never looked back. “That was terrifying because my dad and I ended up having friction, so I had to leave home and now had to battle Lagos, which is an insane place,” he says. “I was in the deep end very quickly, but I had to make this work or die.”

Five years later, that risk, which Azekwoh admits he would have taken with more planning, has paid off. Since leaving school and making a plunge into full-time art, Azekwoh has grown to occupy a specific and important space in the world of Nigerian digital art. His digital works, like The Red Man, have sold for as high as $50,000. Meanwhile, some notable collectors of his works include Cynthia Erivo, Lojay, Young Jonn, and JAE5. 

In the Nigerian cultural zeitgeist, Azekwoh’s works have attained an impressive ability to command and keep attention both offline and online — beloved, as they are, for their emotional readability and technical dazzle. Azekwoh, having now acquired a modest celebrity status for his art, is one of the few Nigerian artists whose pieces translate between digital and physical, and finely toes the line between conventional art and immense commercial appeal. 

“I believe this has become important to youth culture of today as even his career itself stands as a testament to the strength of believing in yourself and going against the grain,” Kiitan Badejo-Okusanya, Azekwoh’s long-time manager, says. “He’s forged a path for himself that disregards the odds, and that courage continues to show itself in his work.”

On a thematic level, Azekwoh’s works blend mythology and history, as seen with well-known paintings like Yasuke, the first African samurai, as well as the Ghanaian folklore legend “Anansi” depicted in human form. His practice moves through different forms, which have birthed sculptural pieces like The Wedding, Yasuke, and Síjibòmi, a black marble bust with a face with a serrated, wavelike exterior.

Badejo-Okunsanya describes Azekwoh’s work as intentionally dichotomous. “It tends to bring together elements one would usually see as contrasting or analogous,” he explains. “[Azekwoh] paints digitally, but replicates texture akin to oil or acrylic. He draws reference from the traditional, but utilizes techniques to create his own spin on them that are modern and almost futuristic in their output. He tells his stories to a global audience, but keeps them firmly rooted in his own identity, culture, and heritage.”

Even though much of Azekwoh’s practice is digital first before gaining physical life, his works, whether paintings or sculptures, are rendered with painstaking depth. It is a skill that shifts many of his thematically fantastical works, the allure of mythical realism.

As he explains it, “I'd always wanted to sculpt, and if you look at paintings like Red Man and how the features are rendered, that's very much in the way you sculpt.”

Child-like wonder

In a world saturated with the abundance of creativity and options for technologically driven distraction, the likelihood of an art piece rising above the noise and driving social media attention can often be traced back to two things: the provocative sensibility of the piece in question, and/or the reputation of the artist who has created that work. For Azekwoh, much of that traces back to the prodigious quality of his work as well as the child-like wonder with which he says he approaches his process.

“Anthony [Azekwoh]’s work is compelling because of his ability to take traditional references, iconography, and themes, and blend them seamlessly with a distinctive African twist,” Badejo-Okusanya shares. “Relatability is an important thing, and I believe his work speaks to much of this generation because he’s telling his, and by extension, our stories.”

“When people start to deep dive into my work and translate it into their own worlds, I was like: this is bigger than this. Watching people cry at my exhibitions and speak to me about what these things meant to them. It gave me a bigger appreciation for what I was doing,” he says.

A more recent example of Azekwoh’s work, drawing strong reactions, can be seen in the attention his latest work, The Bridesmaid, is receiving. Not long after he released the artwork, an oil on canvas-style piece featuring a woman in a headgear, looking sideways with her eyes welling with tears. The ambiguous work opens itself to various interpretations; is she crying for a loss or for joy? The questions ballooned into a mini short story competition with a submission of 1,000 stories. 

That child-like wonder and willingness to explore a range of forms has sometimes led Azekwoh to unpredictable territories. During the NFT art boom, Azekwoh, already established online, was one of the early adopters. But he soon grew wary of the frenzy. “I did have a lot of reservations regarding that. I felt like so much money was being flooded into the system and a lot of people were having this very wrong view of what art was,” he says. To him, a lot of newcomers who didn’t have the patience and commitment needed to sustain a career in digital art wanted to make quick money from the boom — something he quickly figured out was unsustainable. But it hasn’t stopped Azekwoh from experimenting with ways to expand notions of what it means to be a Nigerian digital artist.

Going forward, he is envisioning a world where art, especially in a place like Nigeria, is given the infrastructural support it deserves. “The future at the end of the day just looks more like, ‘How do I expand this vision?’” he says. “The future looks like I'm planning my next solo exhibition. Scale is what I'm really looking at. I've done big paintings. I've done big sculptures. How do we do even bigger things? How do we serve more people? How do we make it so the dream is bigger than me? And that's really just where I am right now, man. Just scaling but slowly and surely.”