Liquidity Is Not Permanence: Lagos and the Limits of Market Infrastructure

In 2015, the suggestion that Lagos could sustain a market ecosystem of fairs, auctions and exhibition cycles would have caused observers to balk.

Ten years later, the infrastructure is visible. Yet its durability is less certain. 

Art X Lagos marked its tenth edition in November 2025. Over the last decade, the self-described leading West African international art fair has attracted more than 700,000 visitors from 170 countries and galleries from 70 nations, catalysing Lagos Art Week around its November platform.

The fair helped establish a rhythm for Lagos’s cultural calendar that other initiatives are now building upon.

On March 6, Lagos Gallery Weekend will open alongside the third edition of +234 Art Fair, having drawn over 10,000 visitors in its inaugural year and activating Lagos’ districts of Ikoyi, Victoria Island, Lekki. 

Yet, amid the celebrations this weekend, a question that has been pressing at the scene for the last ten years will resurface once again: can private platforms sustain an art market without matching public infrastructure?  

Capital Strength and Institutional Thinness

Lagos does not lack capital. It lacks public custodial architecture. Corporate wealth underwrites fairs, prizes and acquisitions. Yet such works rarely enter permanent public collections or anchor sustained state scholarship. They remain in corporate custody. The market demonstrates capital strength but institutional thinness. Hannah O’Leary, now sole head of Modern and Contemporary African Art at Sotheby’s after the restructuring says: “Institutions such as Afreximbank and Access Bank are building serious art collections and are supporting exhibitions and cultural initiatives, which contributes to a more stable and confident market environment”. Lagos, then, suffers from a corporate infrastructure that falls short of public custodianship. Liquidity does not equate to permanence.

In an interview, Tokini Peterside, founder of ART X Lagos, says: “We do not yet have the density of public museums, university collections and research centers that can support and interpret the volume of artistic production coming out of Nigeria.” As a result, she says, fairs and commercial galleries often assume responsibilities — “education, preservation, canon formation” — that in other countries would be shared with public institutions.

Tokini Peterside-Schwebig, 2021. Courtesy ART X Lagos. Photo: Lakin Ogunbawo.

To understand the present, it is necessary to avoid projecting today’s market logic backward. The Nigerian artists we now call modernists did not make art primarily to sell. They may now be the subjects of the major Tate Modern retrospective in London, but they were tutors, teachers and civil servants who produced alongside their vocations. The systems of exchange now surrounding them are largely retrospective and have been consolidated in line with the rise of Lagos’ contemporary art scene.

Almost ten years have passed since Sotheby’s formalised its Modern and Contemporary African Art category in London in 2025. Bonhams had long auctioned modern African art and maintained representation in Nigeria. Sotheby’s, until its 2023 restructuring, operated with a London-based team focused exclusively on the category, while Christie’s and Phillips have not built comparable departments or visible continental infrastructure.  

Founded in Lagos in 2007 by collector Kavita Chellaram, ArtHouse Contemporary ran two auctions annually and became the primary secondary-market platform for modern and contemporary African art in West Africa before suspending its auction programme in the early 2020s. The reasons for its suspension have not been publicly disclosed.

For much of the past decade, high-value African art was shipped to London or Paris and sold in hard-currency markets. But local secondary-market architecture has remained limited. O’Leary is unequivocal: to look at Africa without giving credit to Nigeria would be like looking at the Americas without crediting the United States.

Ben Enwonwu, The Durbar of Eid-ul-Fitr, Kano, Nigeria, 1955. © Ben Enwonwu Foundation. Private Collection

Auction records clarify the hierarchy. Njideka Akunyili Crosby, the Nigerian-born mixed media painter working out of Los Angeles, achieved $4.74 million at Christie’s New York in 2022, with earlier works exceeding estimates by more than 300 percent, while the New York-based Nigerian figurative painter Toyin Ojih Odutola has crossed the seven-figure threshold in 2021 and again in 2024. Ben Enwonwu’s Tutu, a portrait of the Ifẹ princess Adetutu Ademiluyi, created in 1973, reached $1.66 million in 2018, demonstrating that international collectors were willing to pay at significant levels for twentieth-century Nigerian modernism.

Yet these headline results occur in New York, London and Hong Kong—not Lagos—and no Lagos-based living contemporary artist appears at comparable levels. 

Confirmation is not Conversion

Enwonwu’s canonisation was not accidental. He positioned himself within institutional networks and understood how optics shaped reputation and sales. 

Canon formation was strategic: not unlike J.M.W. Turner’s self-positioning in 19th-century Britain. Ben Enwonwu’s Anyanwu (1954–55), originally commissioned for the Nigerian National Museum in Lagos, was later presented by the Nigerian government to the United Nations, while his 1956 bronze portrait of Queen Elizabeth II (the first by an African artist) was exhibited at the Tate Gallery.

That same logic was visible at Frieze London in October 2025, where institutional legitimacy and commercial positioning operated side by side. At Frieze Masters, I worked as a sales representative for Kó Gallery, Lagos: the only Nigerian, and possibly only African-based, gallery in the Masters section. Our booth featured Twins Seven Seven of the Osogbo School. Across town, Tate Modern’s staging of Nigerian Modernism, its mammoth, century-wide survey that set record attendance figures and sharpened discussion and discourse around Nigerian art, its implications for sovereignty and Britain’s colonial histories with the most populous Black nation on earth, even if the deeper discourse around restitution and repatriation remained largely deferred. 

Nigerian Modernism, 2025, (installation view, Tate Modern, London). © Tate. Photo: Jai Monaghan

But institutional shows, even major ones, do not automatically raise market value. Across my three visits to 'Nigerian Modernism', I found audiences more engaged, sometimes newly curious. For some, encountering Twins Seven Seven at Frieze confirmed market legitimacy. But confirmation is not conversion –  visibility does not translate to immediate sales. Serious engagement came from long-term admirers and collectors who already knew the Osogbo School and had lived with the work. The museum brought visibility. It did not directly generate transactions.

Joseph Gergel, Director of Kó Gallery, says art fairs often operate as “a long game”. 

“Relationships with collectors, curators and institutions unfold gradually across multiple presentations,” he says. Since 2025, Kó Gallery has extended this commitment across Frieze Masters, Abu Dhabi Art, Art Basel Miami Beach and Investec Cape Town alongside a December Osogbo School exhibition in Lagos. 

Few galleries are making comparable multi-fair investments in contemporary Nigerian artists. “The market remains strongest with the modernists,” says Hannah O’Leary. This assessment is echoed by Gergel: “Our strongest success has been within Nigerian modernism,” he says, with recent projects generating “a marked increase in interest.” Market viability and institutional validation overlap, but they do not move in lockstep. Collector relationships are built over time. Time cannot be accelerated by capital.

Uzo Egonu, Will Knowledge Safeguard Freedom 2, 1985. © Estate of Uzo Egonu. Courtesy Tate

A New Kind of Market Logic

A generational shift complicates this further. In the 1960s, Nigerian artists travelled abroad to study before often returning home. But by the early 21st century that trajectory had reversed. British-Nigerian and American-Nigerian artists—educated at the Royal College of Art, University of the Arts London, Yale, Rhode Island School of Design —move fluidly across contexts, rarely fitting within a discrete “African art” category. Their work appears in contemporary British, Post-War or global sales. Uzo Egonu offers an earlier precedent. Arriving in Britain as a teenager, Egonu was recognised by critics and institutions as a British post-war painter, though his work also circulates within modern and contemporary African contexts. At Tate’s 'Nigerian Modernism', a room is dedicated to Egonu (as well as Ladi Kwali and Ben Enwonwu), but in different contexts he carries different identities, resisting easy categorisation.

Categorisation itself now follows a new kind of market logic. Christie’s may list Jadé Fadojutimi as British rather than British-Nigerian, placing her in a Contemporary Day Sale instead of an African art category. Sotheby’s may do the same. Auction databases mirror departmental placement, not full cultural identity.

Classification therefore reflects buyer pools, branding and prestige, and a calculation about where a work will sell fastest and at the highest price. Category is economic strategy as much as art-historical taxonomy. Artists such as Fadojutimi embody this shift. 

Born and raised in London, and of Nigerian heritage, her work circulated across multiple sale categories. The frame is no longer singular. 

What is clear is that the next phase of the market will not resemble the previous one, and the terms on which Nigerian art is claimed, sold and historicised are being contested as much as they are being settled.