Arinze Stanley valuation
Self-taught Nigerian draughtsman of hyperrealist portraits in pencil and charcoal, each taking hundreds of hours.
Arinze Stanley was born Arinze Stanley Egbengwu in Lagos in 1993 and took a degree in agricultural engineering at Imo State University; he has no formal art training.
What a work by Arinze Stanley is worth
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Bio
Arinze Stanley was born Arinze Stanley Egbengwu in Lagos in 1993 and took a degree in agricultural engineering at Imo State University; he has no formal art training. He draws hyperrealist portraits in graphite and charcoal on paper, and has since added paint, of Black faces and figures in states of feeling and protest, close up and at large scale, and a single large drawing can take more than two hundred hours. His Gele series takes the Nigerian headwrap as its subject. He shows with galleries in the United States.
His drawings have been offered at auction since the early 2020s. Provenance through his galleries and the condition of the paper are what matter most for works of this kind.
Lagos, graphite and the Gele series
Gele III, a large drawing in charcoal and graphite of 2022, belongs to his series on the headwrap.
His hyperrealist portraits first circulated widely online and in the international art and design press in 2017.
Kelvin Okafor, the Pond Studio and Mirrors
Stanley's father runs a paper-converting business, and Stanley began drawing on paper taken from the factory, with cheap pencils, after coming across the work of the London artist Kelvin Okafor in a video online. Yigal Ozeri and Emmanuel Dascanio are among the other hyperrealists he names. For each drawing he works closely with the sitter and takes some five hundred to a thousand photographs before choosing the one he draws from.
His first group exhibition was in Nigeria in 2016. Mirrors, his first solo show with Jonathan LeVine Projects, ran at the gallery's space in Jersey City in October and November 2018, with drawings including Negro Mona Lisa and Painful Conversations, and Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles later showed Paranormal Portraits. In Lagos he founded the Pond Studio, a workspace and residency for younger artists.
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