Artwork

Emmanuel Unaji was born in 1994 in London, Uk. He studied fashion design and completed a degree in BA (Hons) Fine Art at Kingston School of Art in 2020. Dubbed by British GQ as the Nigerian Artist reinterpreting fashion illustration, Unaji’s a polymath who’s multidisciplinary practice is a wide spectrum, spanning fine and commercial artforms freely combining painting, drawing, collage and product design.

With adept experience in High Fashion, modelling for Brands such as Gucci, Ozwald Boateng, British GQ, Adidas amongst others. Emmanuel has carved out his own space, at the junction of luxury, performance and fine art, where he enjoys deconstructing the images and identities that the media offer up to us. Taking as his subjects fashion models, cultural or political icons, he explores the distance between the perception and reality, and asks the question: what is their truth? How do we relate to them? Emmanuel is interested in engaging the viewer in a conversation, by exploring what lies beneath the images that we consume.

The essence of Emmanuel’s art practice navigates the socioeconomic dichotomy of creativity and business, investigating the intersection of autonomy and public persona, self and celebrity. By subverting the ready-made principal of art, he re-contextualises the polarising nature of the subjectivity applied to protagonists within painting and photography. Like filmmakers, Unaji&Co simultaneously entice and interrogate the angle of the viewer to reveal the cultural significance of the subject thus breaking the 4th wall.