Step Inside Artist Kehinde Wiley’s Lagos Haven

Los Angeles native and New York based visual artist, Kehinde Wiley has firmly situated himself within art history’s portrait painting tradition. Today we get to take a look inside the artist’s creative haven in Lagos, Nigeria.

Kehinde Wiley’s presidential portrait of Barack Obama enshrined him in the annals of history, and since its 2018 unveiling, his groundbreaking career has soared to stratospheric heights. Renowned for his colossal paintings of everyday Black and brown people—scouted from across the diaspora and depicted regally in the vein of the Old Masters—the Nigerian American artist has been hailed as a genre-defining visionary, an iconoclastic showman, and one of the most influential portraitists of his generation. In the past year alone, he’s had shows at the Venice Biennale, Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery in London, and Roberts Projects in Los Angeles. And still yet another will open at New York’s Sean Kelly Gallery this spring.

In rare moments of downtime, the peripatetic artist has historically retreated to Black Rock Senegal, the multi-studio artist residency he founded in Dakar four years ago. Cinematic in scale and named after the volcanic rocks that blanket the neighboring shoreline, the titanic compound overlooking the Atlantic Ocean features a trio of apartments and studios for artists, as well as a majestic private flat for Wiley himself and guest rooms for visiting creatives.

A refuge of choice

His new home in Lagos, Nigeria, however, has become his current refuge of choice. “The Lagos space presented the opportunity to have a much more quiet, interior type of presence in West Africa. It is a temple to solitude, a space to create much more experimental work,” the artist explains, as he makes his way to a light-suffused studio tucked away on the top floor of his intimate, three-story sanctuary. “When I’m here, I paint whenever I feel like it. I paint in the middle of the night. I paint early mornings. I paint without the pressure of commercial obligation, without an endgame in mind. I get to play, feel vulnerable, and oftentimes have breakthroughs.”

Ensconced in a secluded cul-de-sac in Lagos’s tony Victoria Island enclave, the home was previously owned by a local industrialist for several decades. It underwent an extensive, yearlong renovation guided solely by Wiley and his instinctual response to the space as it evolved—architectural improvisation, if you will. “There was never a real plan,” Wiley reveals. Instead, he focused on “allowing the process to be the star of the show.”

Making it a home

He brought down walls, brought in sliding glass doors, kept the chashitsu-inspired flourishes (shoji-esque frosted windows, a lacquered cherrywood staircase), but traded the terra-cotta bricks that once dominated the outside grounds for verdant gardens teeming with local flora. A warren of tiny rooms morphed into a massive primary bed-and-bath suite that manages to be an ode to minimalism and an over-the-top indulgence. He chose black for the faceted exteriors because he enjoyed the juxtaposition of a brutalist façade and an inland Eden.

The focal point of the house, a lyrical, glass-enclosed interior garden and pond, was a huge draw for Wiley because hortus conclusus is one of a handful of recurring themes in his paintings. The avid angler also immediately seized the opportunity to introduce koi fish—another thematic favourite— into the mix. “They’re psychologically nourishing,” he states, later adding that, since childhood, “I’ve been deeply drawn to bodies of water, whether it be my mother waking me up to get me out of the bathtub for fear of me drowning or visiting municipal fishing zones in Los Angeles.”