Victory Adewojo is a Nigerian visual artist working in oil and mixed media. Her surrealist paintings borrow the language of chess — crowns, castles, calculated moves — to ask questions about power, identity, and the games we inherit.
My work borrows the geometry of the chessboard — its hierarchies, its sacrifices, its quiet violence — to talk about how people hold power, lose it, and hand it on. Every painting begins as a question I can’t answer in words: who is really moving whom, and what does it cost to win?
“A crown is only borrowed. The board outlives every king who sits at it.”
Rooted in surrealism and painted mostly in oil, the work sits between the figurative and the dreamed. Figures wear their circumstances like armour; symbols of transformation — the butterfly, the open eye, the toppled piece — recur across the canvases like a private language. I want the viewer to stop, sit, and feel implicated.
The Borrowed Crowns series is the clearest expression of this: portraits of power that never quite belongs to the one who holds it. It is where my questions about identity, inheritance, and freedom are most alive.
Formally trained in Fine & Applied Arts with a focus on painting, Victory works from her studio in Lagos. Alongside the studio practice she moves fluently through the Web3 space — releasing collector editions on-chain and bridging the traditional canvas with digital ownership, so a painting can live both on a wall and in a wallet.
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