The ‘Scam Artist’ Who Outsmarted the Art World

The art world loves a trickster. It needs one, really. Someone who keeps the system honest. For London’s British-Nigerian artist Slawn, the trick is that there’s no trick at all. He paints, builds, provokes, and laughs his way through it, testing how far an artist can bend the rules before they break.

Born Olaolu Akeredolu-Ale in Lagos, Slawn came up through Nigeria’s first skate shop, Wafflesncream, and later co-founded Motherlan, the skate brand that caught Virgil Abloh’s attention. His story starts in motion: skating, designing, moving. That restlessness still defines his work. He calls himself a “scam artist,” but it isn’t cynicism. It’s humor. The scam is that art was never meant to be this serious in the first place.

Slawn paints like someone trying to find truth in the mess. His world is full of big, cartoonish faces with twisted smiles and heavy eyes, images that sit somewhere between satire and sincerity. He paints the way the internet feels: unfiltered, fast, and self-aware. His 2024 show at Saatchi Yates, I Present to You, Slawn, was built around one thousand spray-painted canvases he finished in a single day. It was part endurance test, part performance art, part joke. That’s the Slawn equation: humor as honesty, scale as statement.

You can’t talk about Slawn without talking about energy. He’s the kind of artist who brings noise wherever he goes. One week he’s painting for the FA, the next he’s fronting Timberland’s ICONIC campaign with Naomi Campbell, teasing a Nike project, or repainting a Bentley. He designed the 2023 BRIT Award trophy, becoming the youngest and first Nigerian-born artist to do it, and still finds time to run BeauBeaus, a café and art space he shares with his partner Tallula. Walk inside and it feels like an extension of his brain: people sketching, playing chess, spilling paint, sharing jollof rice. It isn’t a gallery. It’s an ecosystem.

That curiosity drives his most controversial work. When he customized a Rolex Day-Date, better known as the Presidential, and replaced its dial with one of his painted characters, purists called it blasphemy. But it made perfect sense. A Rolex is supposed to be untouchable. Slawn wanted to see what happens when you touch it anyway. He’s been compared to Basquiat for his chaos and to Banksy for his irreverence, but what he’s really doing is flipping the power dynamic. Who decides what’s sacred? Who gets to participate?

That question keeps showing up in his work. His Ode to KAWS project divided audiences. Some called it a tribute, others imitation. That missed the point. Slawn grew up in remix culture: skate videos, streetwear, bootlegs, hip-hop. Borrowing isn’t theft. It’s how culture talks to itself. His art doesn’t worship originality. It celebrates participation.

And that’s the heart of his practice: radical openness. He gives away paintings, hosts fight clubs where the winner takes a piece home, and invites strangers into his café to make something, anything. The art world thrives on exclusivity, but Slawn’s work thrives on access. He isn’t dismantling the system out of anger. He’s doing it out of joy.

For all the chaos, there’s control beneath it. Slawn writes letters to his future self, reminding himself to never stop, to keep his foot on the gas. His irreverence isn’t carelessness. It’s strategy. He isn’t chasing credibility. He’s testing what happens when you stop asking for it.

Maybe that’s what makes him such a force right now. In a time when art is treated like an asset class, Slawn is proof that the most valuable thing an artist can offer is freedom: the freedom to play, to provoke, and to create without permission.