This article is part of my first written assignment for the Executive Masters in Art Market Studies 2023-25 in the University of Zurich and eventually will be incorporated in my final thesis. Writing about digital artists was born out of arguments with lecturers (not going to name any names) and the need to shed light on artists whose work escapes the narrow confines of the majority of NFT criticism.
The second artist to release is Osinachi (see first). Osinachi was the artist to lure me into the rabbit hole of digital art back in 2021. I have enjoyed following his journey ever since and was ecstatic to finally acquire some of his works in the second half of 2023.
Osinachi is a self-taught digital artist based in Lagos, Nigeria. Born in 1991, he grew up in Aba, where before developing an interest in visual art, he had a passion for writing and literature. He wrote poems, plays, short fiction stories, and essays, and was an active member of the writing community of the University of Nigeria. In one of his essays, A Man and his Breasts, Osinachi goes over his struggles of growing up with gynecomastia, which deeply affected his perception of masculinity, a theme that he is going to explore in depth later on in his art.
In parallel to being a passionate writer, Osinachi gets involved with digital art from very early in his life. In 2005, he discovered the drawing tools in Microsoft Word at a cyber cafe that he frequented to type his scripts. “I started exploring [the drawing tools] and took a deep interest in it. Whenever I saw a computer or laptop, I would head straight to Microsoft Word and start trying to create things.” Eventually his passion for visual art will overtake that of writing, as it becomes easier for him to express himself through art. “I like giving my work room to evolve and that's not very easy for me in writing. I don't have the stamina to do a lot of writing, honestly." He graduated from the university in 2014 and shortly after decided to pursue a career as an artist.
In 2018, he became the first-ever Nigerian artist to showcase artworks at the Ethereal Summit, a conference in New York that seeked to bridge the gap between technology and art through blockchain. Shortly afterwards he was shortlisted for the Bridgeman Studio Award 2019. In January 2019, he published A Boy Can Be Anything, his first work on SuperRare. His subsequent works on the platform are going to catapult his career.
2020 is a transformative year for the artist in terms of recognition and even more importantly his own style. While he continues to tackle topics of masculinity, LGTBQ rights, family life, and pop culture in Africa, he evolves the faux-naĂŻf style that he utilized up to that point to add texture to his characters and starts using the signature dark gray color in bodies without eyes that accompanies his works to this day. At the same time, he starts using the GIF format in many of his works which breathes life to his characters.
In March 2020 he had his first ever solo show named “Existence as Protest” at Kate Vass Galerie in Zurich. Jason Bailey, an early supporter of crypto art and Osinachi, writes in the foreword of the show: “Osinachi is a brilliant protest artist. Rather than depict dramatic scenes of struggle and conflict as is often typical with protest art, his weapon of choice is to highlight normalcy and positivity. His government has some of the most vicious anti-LGTBQ laws in the world, yet he chooses to celebrate this community in the face of these laws by showing its members happily living their lives as everyday human beings. By avoiding negativity and drama and simply presenting positive images of people just trying to live their lives, Osinachi completely defangs anti-LGBTQ propaganda. Rather than pour gas on a fire, he extinguishes it all together.”
Beyond mentioning his grandmother when asked about his influences, Osinachi credits Devan Shimoyama, Tschabalala Self, and Njideka Akunyili-Crosby. He relates to Njideka’s art expressing what it was like to be raised as an Igbo child in an Igbo home. He appreciates Tschabalala for exaggerating the female figure and celebrating women, and Shimoyama for celebrating the male body.
In Art Basel 2021 at Galerie Nagel Draxler’s Crypto Kiosk, Osinachi’s Resignation and A Portrait of the Artist at 29 became the first NFTs to be exhibited in an international art fair, alongside works from a few other digital artists.
2021 is also the peak of the crypto and NFT markets and some of Osinachi’s works both in the primary and secondary market are trading north of $100,000. His highest selling work to date is Take The Stares which was sold by Osinachi in January 2020 for a bit above $300, then resold first in August 2021 for $96,000, only to be flipped two months later for $180,000. The final purchaser of the work was the infamous hedge fund 3AC, who ironically went bankrupt a few months later, an event which exacerbated the crypto market crash of 2022. As part of 3AC’s liquidation proceedings, Take The Stares was auctioned at Sotheby’s in January 2024 for $20,320 which made it Osinachi’s first Sotheby’s appearance.
Before Sotheby’s, Osinachi had already established his presence in the major auction houses by auctioning works in the primary market at Christie’s. In October 2021 he auctioned Different Shades of Water at Christie’s London, a series of five works inspired by David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) from 1972. This sale made him the first African artist to sell NFTs at Christie’s. All five works sold for a total of £155,000. He would return to sell at Christie’s again two years later but more on that later.
2022 is a tough year for the whole crypto industry and digital artists were not left unscathed. At the same time though, this is the year when museums get serious about acquiring NFTs in their permanent collections. In December 2022, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum acquired 16 NFT artworks, creating the first major collection of NFTs for an art museum in the United States. One of the works acquired was Osinachi’s +rave-sing (traversing), an edition of four.
Osinachi’s museum discourse will continue into 2023 when he enrolls in an art residency at the Toledo Museum of Art. This is the first time in the history of the museum where a digital artist is a resident. In Adam Levine’s words, the director of the museum: “We had been thinking about how we could fully engage with artists who create digitally, bringing artists into our community, and going into theirs. Our goal was to treat digital art as art, and to give them the opportunity to explore their own practice and really build on this notion of community, which is as important for us here as it is in the Web3 space.”
One of the results of this residency was Abitt: The Second Renaissance is Coming with imagery deeply rooted in Toledo’s history and current times. The work was auctioned at Christie’s for $16,864 and the Toledo Museum of Art acquired the artist’s proof, making Osinachi one of the very few NFT artists to have been collected by multiple museums to this day.