34-year-old America-based Nigerian artist, Toyin Ojih Odutola, has become the third highest selling Nigerian artiste of all time after selling one of her works for roughly N215 Million.
She became a phenomenon with the growing popularity of her pen ink drawings, which raises salient questions about the construction of blackness.
Toyin recently sold one of her fantastic drawings at the Sotheby’s – a piece titled ‘Compound Leaf’ – for £471,000 which is approximately N215 million. This sale earned her the 3rd position as the highest selling Nigerian artist of all time, following fellow female artist, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, and the Legendary Ben Enwonwu.
Following her move to America at age 5, Toyin reportedly became aware of her blackness and began to question her identity and resolved to using art as coping mechanism to handle the shock of such a transition. The mechanism overtime transformed into an “investigative, learning activity” for her.
Sharing how art helped her escape, in an interview with Vogue, the artist shared: “I was obsessed, capturing everything I saw and being fascinated with the incredibly simple task of looking at something and transmitting it onto paper. It’s an immediate magic.”
Born in 1985, Toyin Ojih Odutola is a Nigerian-born, American Visual Artist known for her vivid multimedia drawings and works on paper. Ojih Odutola produces multimedia drawings that engage in the complexity and shape-ability of identity.
