Upon first encountering one of Sejiro Avoseh’s paintings, you are immediately taken aback. Faces glare out, all twisted and patched together, mouths swapped for car grilles, headlights for eyes, bodies chopped up and rebuilt like scrapyard machines. Forget classic portraits. These are more like visual tremors, shaking up everything you thought you knew about identity, migration, and the constant churn of movement.
Born in Lagos in 1990, Avoseh has carved out a name for himself far beyond Nigeria. His shows pop up everywhere: New York, Paris, Miami, Johannesburg. The work is restless, just like him. Collages stacked with memories and migration stories, buzzing with energy. You can sense it, particularly if you’ve ever experienced a sense of dislocation within your own being. For more than ten years, he’s made art that won’t sit still. He bounces between Nigeria and the UK, between deeply personal memoir and pointed political commentary, and between bold paint and frantic collage.
Discover Sejiro Avoseh’s striking mixed-media art fusing humans with automobiles, exploring migration and identity across New York, Paris, and Lagos galleries.
Who’s the Traveller Hiding Behind These Mechanical Faces?
Avoseh grew up as the seventh of ten kids in Badagry, on the edge of Lagos. Art wasn’t really a thing in his family. He had to stumble his way into it and figure things out on his own. This isolation, which involves being forced to invent oneself without guidance, is a central theme in his work.
He picked up his National Diploma at Lagos State Polytechnic in 2010, then a Higher National Diploma in Painting in 2013. School gave him the basics, sure, but Lagos himself was the real teacher. The city’s wild chaos, squeezed between poverty and wild displays of wealth, shaped him. Lagos isn’t just a backdrop in his art; it’s the pulse in every shattered face and chopped-up body.
In 2021, Avoseh packed up and left Nigeria for Canterbury, England, chasing an MA in Fine Art at the University for the Creative Arts. He finished in 2022. Ask him why he left, and he doesn’t sugarcoat it: “I left because home was feeling like the mouth of a shark.” Home is something ready to swallow you whole; that’s the desperation fuelling so many to run from Nigeria these days.
Why Mix People and Cars?
You spot an Avoseh painting a mile away. Human bodies are tangled up with car parts, almost like they are morphing into machines. It’s a style he’s honed for years. At first, it puzzles you, but then the metaphor snaps into focus.
“I see myself as a traveller in life,” Avoseh says. “Most of what I paint comes from things and events around me. I use automobile-like faces and forms because I see life as a journey. I make the cars feel alive.”
This isn’t just clever art-school talk. It’s his real life, turned into paint and collage. Avoseh calls it “expressive figuration”, a mash-up of abstraction, figuration, and collage. He blends the elements of people and car parts to emphasise concepts of movement, transformation, and the relentless pace of contemporary life. We are all vehicles, his paintings say. We are all vehicles, carrying weight, breaking down, getting patched up, and heading towards destinations we might never reach.
Even his technique echoes this idea. He digs through newspapers and magazines, grabbing scraps to build his images. These fragments, ripped from their old contexts, are bits of his story, looking for fresh meaning. The finished surfaces are crowded with abstract, sometimes grotesque figures, less about anatomical correctness and more about poetry in distortion.
What Drives His Wild Creative Energy?
For Avoseh, art isn’t about neat lines or calm reflection. His process feels more like a flood of ideas, all crashing into each other at once. “I believe as a human being, I am always in motion,” he says. That constant movement, body, mind, spirit, powers everything he creates.
He keeps things close to the chest. Comments stay off on his Instagram. Video calls? No thanks. He prefers short, sharp answers over text. There’s a storm in him, but he keeps it contained until it spills out onto canvas. The paintings feel loud, full of clues about a restless imagination, but Avoseh himself stays quiet and guarded. He lets his job shout while he stands back and listens.
How Did He Go Global?
By 2017, Avoseh was already on people’s radar. Rele Arts Foundation picked him for their Young Contemporaries programme, where he even did live art at the first ArtX Lagos. A year later, art critic Jess Castellote called him one of “18 young Nigerian visual artists under 30 to follow.” Indeed, his assessment was accurate.
But it was probably Avoseh’s 2020 commission for The Native magazine that really showed what he could do. They tapped him to create the cover for Wizkid’s Made in Lagos album. Instead of a simple portrait, Avoseh brought all of Wizkid’s different personas together in one piece, splitting and merging them across the canvas, showing both who Wizkid is and who he’s become. The result? Classic Avoseh. Complicated, layered, impossible to pin down, and just plain stunning.
His first solo show, “When We Are Not What We Are”, opened at Rele Gallery in Lagos back in July 2018. Thirty works, four different series. The title itself was a metaphor, picking apart how people perform and adapt to the pressures of modern life.
Does His Art Speak to Nigeria’s Politics?
Absolutely. Avoseh’s art digs straight into the heart of Nigerian society. He wants to shake up the system. His “Hungry and Angry” series goes right at Nigeria’s political struggles. Even though he made it before the #EndSARS protests in October 2020, the work nails that feeling of injustice and frustration that pushed so many people onto the streets.
The faces in his paintings, twisted by pain and rage, show a revolt against deep inequality and a fight for freedom and change. It’s the portrait of a nation that’s had enough, a generation starving for respect, where anger and hunger are tangled up together. This isn’t just art with something to say about politics. It’s art that joins the fight.
He didn’t stop there. In 2020, Avoseh’s solo show “Abuse of Innocence” at Angels and Muse in Lagos kept up his tough look at power, corruption, and the fate of those left behind. Through his work, he speaks out for people crushed by officials who abuse their power, giving a voice to those who rarely get one.
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What Does Migration Mean in His Work?
Since leaving home, Avoseh’s whole world has been caught in limbo. Suddenly, questions about alienation and belonging aren’t just ideas; they are daily realities for him. His 2023 show “Aliens in Spaces” at Kravets Wehby Gallery in New York pretty much laid it all bare: what happens after you leave everything behind. For an African stepping outside their country, there’s a sharp moment of realising your Blackness in a way you never had to at home. You are moving through a coldness, not just the weather, but also in people, chasing some kind of acceptance.
Avoseh doesn’t dodge any of this. “We are aliens travelling through space; this is not our land,” he says. Now, with distance from his past, Avoseh’s Nigerian roots, the oppression he faced in Nigeria, and the challenges of adapting to a country that once colonised his own have become the lens through which he views everything he creates. There’s displacement everywhere you look in his work: not just geographic, but cultural, historical, and psychological. It all bleeds into what he creates now.
Take a painting like “Seviyon in Green Gown”; he’s in it, alongside his daughter and son. In “Spiderman Cap”, his son just enjoys being a kid. But these family portraits aren’t soft or simple; they are twisted, sometimes grotesque, and always challenging. When people ask why he paints his family this way, Avoseh lays it out: “It is a style that will last, and I do it to protect myself. Before anyone calls me a monkey, I have represented myself as a deformed alien. So nothing gets to me at this point.”
It’s armour, really; art turned into a shield. By distorting his own image first, by owning the grotesque, Avoseh takes the sting out of racist attacks before they hit. It’s clever and heartbreaking at the same time and says a lot about the mental weight of being a Black artist in mostly white spaces.
Where Has His Work Travelled?
Avoseh’s art has travelled around the world, to Kravets Wehby Gallery in New York, Afikaris Gallery in Paris, Jupiter Contemporary in Miami, Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, the Dubai Art Fair, and FNB Art Joburg in Johannesburg. In 2024 alone, he had “Faces of Nowhere” at Kravets Wehby and “A Chorus of Reminiscence” at Jupiter Contemporary in Miami.
He did a residency at The Cabin LA, and joined group shows like “Résiste” at Afikaris Gallery, Paris (2021), next to Salifou Lindou, a show that cast both artists as voices pushing back against oppression and injustice.
Major publications have picked up his work too: Le Monde, Financial Times, Google Arts & Culture, and Whitehot Magazine. Collectors put his pieces next to Basquiat, Picasso, and KAWS, a lineup that really shows just how much his star is rising in the global art scene.
What Makes His Collage Technique Distinctive?
Avoseh’s collage technique pins his art right between the real and the abstract. He cuts pieces from magazines, mixes them with painting, and ends up with these hybrid, almost sci-fi forms, somewhere between bodies and machines. The way he builds his work actually mirrors his life: always changing, always adapting, just like the world around him.
“I am painting the lives that have entered mine,” he says. “I am also painting the effects these lives have had on mine; how they have lifted me.” This isn’t just for art’s sake. It’s about survival, relationships, and the way every encounter leaves a mark.
His process is instinctive, but he’s always thinking, personal stories tangled up with bigger social and political ideas. His figures show the messiness of memory, the pain of being uprooted, and the search for where you fit. They are fragments pieced together by his vision, broken, yes, but somehow whole. All of it comes together to say something real about being human right now.
Conclusion
Sejiro Avoseh’s mixed-media work really lives where personal stories and politics collide, where his Nigerian roots meet a bigger, global conversation. He blends old-school painting with wild, unpredictable collage. By fusing human bodies with car parts, he’s come up with this striking visual language that just nails something about life right now: we are all moving, always in transit, holding ourselves together while everything around us threatens to fall apart.
That’s where Sejiro’s art lands its punch. He’s not here to hand out easy answers. He asks sharp questions and doesn’t try to calm the chaos—he leans into it. He refuses to smooth out the weirdness or hide the jagged edges. It’s those distortions, the machine bits, the chopped-up forms that end up telling the real story. Honestly, a polished portrait could never get that close to the truth.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Sejiro Avoseh?
Born in Lagos in 1990, Sejiro Avoseh is a contemporary artist now working out of Canterbury, England. He’s known for his mixed-media pieces that mash up human figures with car parts, digging deep into ideas like migration, identity, and change.
What’s his signature technique?
He layers paint with scraps from newspapers and magazines, building up collages where people and machines merge. The figures end up twisted and transformed, capturing life as one endless journey.
Where has his work been shown?
You’ll find his art at Kravets Wehby Gallery in New York, Afikaris Gallery in Paris, Jupiter Contemporary in Miami, Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, Dubai Art Fair, and FNB Art Joburg in Johannesburg.
What’s his educational background?
He earned a Higher National Diploma in Painting from Lagos State Polytechnic in 2013, then went on to get his MA in Fine Art from the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury in 2022.
What themes does he explore?
His work explores themes such as migration, alienation, identity, political oppression in Nigeria, the immigrant experience in former colonial countries, relationships, memory, and the way we perform our lives.
Why use automobile parts?
For Sejiro, life’s a journey, and people are travellers. In his art, cars are depicted as almost alive. The mechanical parts stand for movement and change, and for how modern life can turn us into something a little less than human.
Any major commissions?
In 2020, The Native magazine asked him to design the cover for Wizkid’s Made in Lagos album. He made a layered portrait that captured the artist’s growth.
Why did he move to England?
In 2021, he left Nigeria for Canterbury to pursue his Master’s degree, citing challenging political and economic conditions in his home country as the reason.
