Slawn: Jester With the Keys

Slawn answers the phone from the car. There’s a low, steady hum beneath his voice. The rhythmic click of a turn signal. The distracted silence while the car merges across a couple lanes of London traffic. The familiar sound of someone musing to himself from the passenger seat. We talk like that for a while. It feels a bit strange, but it’s honest. There’s no PR rep sitting in the corner nervously checking their watch every five minutes. There’s no curator-guided studio tour. I’m just catching an artist in transit, suspended right between one massive project and the next.

The Hypebeast Magazine cover shoot is on the agenda, sure. But right now it’s Saatchi Yates. For weeks, Slawn has treated the London gallery like his actual studio, just with a live audience. Forget the sterile sanctity of the traditional white cube. It’s gone. Walk in on a random Tuesday afternoon and all kinds of canvases are sitting there, halfway done. By the end of the day, those same surfaces might be sprayed over, rubbed out, or entirely scrapped and rebuilt.

Music bleeds from a shack-like recording studio built right onto the gallery floor. Skepta drops by. Obongjayar and Youngs Teflon are hanging out. You’ve got London creatives and Lagosian skaters lingering near the likes of Fikayo Awe, Kida Kudz, Fatso, and John Bay Axe-Worthy. In the center of it all, artist and graffiti hero Opake is prepping his cans, getting ready to head out with Slawn for our cover shoot — where the two will collaborate live on the cover art itself, the same way everything else here gets made: in the moment, together, with no plan. Someone listens back to a verse over the monitors while somebody else pushes a heavy painting inches to the left. You’re witnessing an album take shape while the acrylic is still wet on the walls. This month-long residency culminated in a new collaborative album titled Not An Artist, executive produced by Arthur Bean. Featuring 16 songs, it’s a sonic extension of the residency chaos, featuring a heavy-duty lineup including Unknown T, AntsLive, and JELEEL! recorded right there amidst the spray fumes. It’s a far cry from Slawn’s early fight club days in the studio where his fans, with cult-like urgency, would swarm the space and brawls would break out for the chance to walk away with one of his paintings.

You could call it an “activation” or a gallery experiment, but that sounds too corporate. The space is a collision of worlds with London collectors in tailored suits standing shoulder to shoulder with kids in tracksuits who showed up just to watch Slawn paint. The wall between the finished masterpiece and the messy process of making it vanishes. Operating this way is a big gamble because the fine art market thrives on polish, provenance, and clarity. Buyers want to know exactly what they’re paying for, but Slawn thrives in this chaos.

Scan Slawn’s track record up close and his rise makes sense. He grew up in Lagos, co-founded the skate and streetwear crew Motherlan, and soaked up the city’s underground scene. It was there he caught the eye of Skepta, who recognized the raw energy of the Motherlan kids long before the rest of the world caught on. Early validation from the North London kingpin gave Slawn the fuel to land in the UK with plenty of momentum. This wasn’t just street cred, as it translated directly to the auction block when Skepta curated Slawn’s 2022 Sotheby’s debut, forcing the traditional market to reckon with a then-22-year-old who surpassed the usual MFA-to-gallery pipeline. Shortly thereafter, he realized in today’s digital age that everything is a canvas if you take the opportunity to claim it.

To understand Slawn’s impact, you have to see him as the inevitable conclusion of a street art lineage that started with the subway-to-canvas transitions of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, ran through Banksy’s culture-jamming dissent, evolved into the gallery-safe pop of KAWS, and has now mutated into something much more visceral and digitally sovereign. He occupies a space alongside his current peers like the camo-obsessed Soldier and the visual world-building of Gabriel Moses. They are part of a tight-knit London vanguard, including the likes of Clint from Corteiz, where the goal isn’t just to be accepted by the art world, but build a parallel universe of current mainstream culture.

But to reduce Slawn to a London story or even a Lagos one is to miss the larger signal. His recent moves — the Art Basel takeover, the institutional co-signs from Atlanta’s High Museum, the viral spectacle of his public installations — suggest a figure on the verge of a genuinely global reckoning. Where KAWS crossed over through toys and IP, and Banksy through anonymity and provocation, Slawn’s crossover vector is something newer: a digitally native, diaspora-forged fluency that doesn’t ask for a cultural passport. He’s not the next big thing out of London. He might just be the next big thing, full stop.

So way before institutional giants like Saatchi Yates came calling, Slawn bypassed traditional gatekeepers through social media, engineering marketing moments that treated disruption itself as the medium. The brush was just one tool. He operated on a “muscle memory” style that favored speed and intuition over technical polish. His canvases are a wild flurry of acrylic, oil stick, and spray paint where vivid, bold-colored portraits bleed into jagged graffiti tags and abstract, jazz-like improvisations. While grinning faces, a reclamation of the “Sambo” image, are his signature motif, Slawn’s work is usually defined by its unresolved surfaces complete with drips that are left visible and lines that are loose. He rejects the notions of fine art and favors the bold rather than the precious across his interdisciplinary practice. Critics have made comparisons between his rough, spontaneous strokes and the “contemptuous nonchalance” of Haring and Basquiat, but Slawn doesn’t seem to care about art history as much as the impact.

From a Rolex watch to a Supreme Box Logo, he’s turned pretty much everything into a canvas for his grinning faces. Not to mention, he caught a bit of heat from KAWS and Disney for his “unofficial” figures. These pieces were essentially unauthorized remixes of the iconic KAWS Companion and Disney’s Mickey Mouse silhouettes translated into 3D sculptures that played with the thin line between street-level tribute and high-art subversion. Still, his motive was to hustle and create like a machine without needing the go-ahead from anyone or the industry’s blessing. His provocative digital strategies mirror the energy of collaborators like Opake, who shares that same ethos of rule breaking at every turn. But Slawn takes the spectacle further, spearheading disruptive, viral gestures like building a giant Nike Air Max statue or an inflatable figure of a wide-eyed clown towering over a London bridge to turn the city itself into a gallery.

The industry eventually had to play by his rules. In 2021, the late Virgil Abloh pulled Slawn into Louis Vuitton’s sprawling 200 Trunks, 200 Visionaries exhibition, one of the final major initiatives Abloh oversaw before he passed in November of the same year. Slawn took a classic LV suitcase and covered it in his recurring lips motif. That same subversive method carried over to the BRIT Awards statuette he designed in 2023. Entrusted to fellow legends like Vivienne Westwood and Zaha Hadid, Slawn cast the award in bronze and conceptually used it as a Trojan horse. He took the helmet off the Britannia figure; in Nigeria, taking off your hat is a deep sign of respect for your elders, and the bronze itself served as a visceral tie to the Benin Bronzes sitting in the British Museum just a few miles away. He took a shining symbol of British pop culture supremacy, loaded it with Nigerian heritage and handed it back to them on national TV.

He’s since taken over numerous institutional rooms that used to be completely closed off to people in his orbit. Where he once spray painted bootleg art cars just for the hell of it, now he’s painting Lamborghinis and F1 cars on behalf of Red Bull, as well as designing album artwork for heavyweights like 21 Savage and doing Art Basel takeovers on behalf of Instagram. At the center of his ever-expanding ecosystem is BeauBeau’s, an East London cafe named after his son that he runs with his long-time partner, Tallula. It’s an entirely new hub in his ecosystem, a spot where kids play chess and eat jollof rice while sitting next to million-dollar art. All of this goes to show that Slawn’s not thinking about just a singular project or a painting. Rather, he’s building a cultural infrastructure where he serves as the architect.

The scale of his life has exploded over the last few years, but the underlying logic hasn’t moved an inch. To decode Slawn, though, you have to look past the friction. The art world loves to pigeonhole young, disruptive talent with the “street artist” label, but for a young Nigerian kid navigating the UK, the canvas was simply a legally safe sanctuary. He respects the graffiti kids taking risks in the train yards, but his come up required a different route. Still, translation remains a hurdle. Last year, Slawn went back to Lagos for a homecoming show called Bobo. Named after his family nickname, the show was meant to strip away the burgeoning “Slawn” mythology, but crossing borders changes the frequency of the work. It’s a diaspora struggle realizing you can conquer the world, but when you bring the spoils back home, you have to learn an entirely new language to explain it. But Slawn doesn’t sit in the in-between for long. On the phone, he talks about next moves. He knows the art market is precarious, so he’s setting up a safety net of personal projects and brand deals so he never has to worry about money again.

When it comes to his identity in the art world, Slawn dodges conventional titles. He’s far from a traditional artist and is most definitely not playing a tortured or self-righteous provocateur. He’s the jester who owns the court, sitting comfortably in London galleries while taking checks from blue-chip collectors. He’s close enough to the power to manipulate it, but detached enough not to care.

The car hums and switches lanes. The studio is waiting.

Estiler: You’ve turned Saatchi Yates into a live working studio. Does an audience change your headspace or do you just tune them out?

Slawn: No, I don’t think I tune them out. I tune them in. I don’t think with my conscious self, it’s more subconscious. Whenever I’m speaking to people, it changes my work a lot, which I find good. There’s always ni**as in my studio, I prefer to work that way. Someone once gave me the wrong line while I was working and I was looking for a razor or something to fix it, like, “No, just rub it out.” And I realized I liked how that looked. So in this new show, on some of the works, I’ll spray the paint on there and just rub it out. It gives a nice effect.

From Lambos to an F1 car and even the statuette for the Brits, do you feel like this has moved insanely fast like all your projects?

No, not that fast. I’ve been in this industry since I was like 16, so I feel mad old. So yeah it doesn’t. I don’t really feel it. It’s just my job.

With everything happening so fast, do you ever actually stop to take it all in, or are you just focused on keeping the momentum going?

No moments to reflect if you think it’s going to end. That’s when it’s over.

You once said in an interview that you’re treating these projects like a video game. Sitting here now, what does the final boss look like? Or are you not seeing an end to it?

If this one was a game it would be free roam mode. If you want to do that mission, you could end it. But there’s no end goal. This is just like free roam right now — side quests and stuff.

Your signature faces almost started out like caricatures. As your life changed over the last few years, do those faces feel more like a mask or more like self-portraits?

They’re masks, yeah. I use them as masks so I can get behind them and do whatever I want to do. But I see things from them, from my work sometimes.

In your homecoming show, Bobo, you mentioned that the “Slawn” persona feels like a foreign figure to people in Nigeria. Is Slawn just a myth you built for London, and now you’re trying to step forward as Olaolu?

Man look, I wish that I could use my real name. Slawn’s just a nickname for my work, I tell people this all the time. I was fascinated with the concept of a jester. Because the jester is the only character in the kingdom that could mimic the king and not get executed. So if I could see some things that no one else could see, why not?

The fine art space likes to use words like “homage” or “appropriation.” But there’s a lot of things that you say that are just blunt. Like you say you steal from everybody…

Look, the internet is for everyone. It’s a public space, man. People like to say it’s private sometimes, but it’s not. If you put something of yours up and I think it works for me, I’m picking it up. There’s freedom in that. I want to be free enough to do whatever I want, all the time. Honestly, I don’t really care.

Did going back to Lagos and doing Bobo give you some sort of creative freedom that you can’t do in London?

The creative freedom felt more comfortable. The reception for that exhibition was good but it didn’t stick. The concept didn’t get across to people in Nigeria that much. Because I think people from my origins… sometimes it’s hard for them to enjoy my work because they don’t know the process or how to get to that point, context speaking.

Going back to your skate and street art roots, we’ve seen street artists become museum regulars. Is street art and graffiti even taboo anymore?

I don’t think I’ve ever done street art because I’m too scared to go outside and paint since I’m on a visa. I don’t want to get arrested, for real. Yeah, so these guys risk their lives every day to paint these trains and stuff, so I don’t want to be disrespecting them. But there’s a fine line between intentional art with canvases and spray painting on the street. The problem with that fine line is like left and right. If it’s spray paint on the canvas, the graff kid might be calling you a nerd and shit. But if it’s spray painting outside, the person that’s inside the studio doing the canvas may look a little snobby or whatever. But I just like to do what I like to do.

Do you still consider fine art, personal projects, and commercial work one and the same?

You go to the small and then to the big. Cover ground like a soldier.

How do you maneuver through these different opportunities? How do you decide what to say yes or no to?

The one that has the most money. If there’s a lot of money involved, then I’ll try and make it work. But it’s also corny to me to call things corny. Because what’s really corny to me is trying to be cool by becoming someone else.

Content creators are somehow becoming the new contemporary artists with social media. Are you ever critical of another person’s creativity?

I don’t like to judge people. I’m only really critical of my work. I just try to make a living off my art so I can afford rent. What I don’t like is boring, boring art.

Do you ever worry about burning out or do you not believe in breaking points?

The possibility of falling off is a reality, but I don’t care if I do fall off because I’ll just find another thing to do.

What advice would you give someone that doesn’t come from a fine art background and wants to follow the same path as you?

I don’t have no fine art background. I don’t have no street art background. I was just an immigrant who came to this country and found something to do as anyone else would. So I think you just gotta stop worrying about all that nonsense and just do it.

Who gave you that first chance to enter an institutional space and did you feel any imposter syndrome?

Virgil encouraged me a lot. He put me in with 200 artists in his big LV show with all these suitcases. Skepta fit more with my personality and really connected to my art. He was the person that gave me the first instance of feeling, “If he likes you then must be doing something right.” It was onto the next after that.

Were there ever deal breakers that you just had to say no to while you’re navigating institutional spaces?

I mean no — there’s no line that’s too far. When you have a line that’s too far then you’ve just kind of limited your work. But there’s nothing that’s too far when it comes to expressing yourself.

With constant labeling around the fine art world — like blue chip or red chip — how do you define yourself and what area do you fit in?

I don’t fit in anywhere freely. I don’t think anyone could box me into a space. Let’s say people like who they like. I’ve never been thinking that I’ve done something extremely wrong or extremely right.

How does your mindset shift when you go from galleries to being the guy they hand the keys to?

No one knew me when I used to make tees and so forth for people’s brands. So I made a thousand tees and told all these kids to go to the gallery that I’m working in. They didn’t know me back then, but asked for my work. So there’s all of these kids going in there like, “Do you have any Slawn work available?” And they were like we don’t know who the fuck that is… but now they do. So that’s how I planted the chip.

Let’s go to the work that you’re doing at Saatchi Yates. Are you working with new mediums for your live studio?

Yeah, you know what my old work was. The lines were very very clean and now it’s a bit rough. I can’t really do the clean line stuff anymore because I’ve gotten onto something new. I forget all that stuff from before. It’s rough too coz I’ve been using charcoal. It’s rough lines and I like it.

What was the vision for this Hypebeast cover that you want to paint?

The same way I approach everything. Just go at it and bring my friends. See my friend across here [points to Opake], if he has a job, he’ll pull me in. I do the same.

How important is it to help the homies and show love using your platform?

That’s how it works man, we help each other. It just makes more sense to do things with other people in this world. I don’t know all of the people in my world. That’s how collaborations sometimes work, like there’s people I know and who I don’t know. But with my people, it’s like a Megazord. For me when the opp is too big, they transform and they add their stuff to help carry it.

What do you have coming up apart from this live studio at Saatchi?

Working on the next exhibition in Japan. And also there’s this next big thing in April. I can’t speak on it yet, though.

With the Slawn legacy, are you also wishing that your kids could be artists, too? Are you giving them that creative freedom?

I don’t want my kids to be artists. I want them to be doctors, smart. We need more doctors in the world. Yeah, I want all my kids to be scientists or microbiologists.