[2] A seminal figure in British contemporary art,[3] Fani-Kayode explored the tensions created by sexuality, race and culture through stylised portraits and compositions.

[4] His father, Chief Babaremilekun Adetokunboh Fani-Kayode (1921-1995), was a politician[5] and chieftain of Ifẹ, an ancestral Yoruba city.

[5] The Fani-Kayode family moved to Brighton, England, in 1966, after the military coup and the ensuing civil war in Nigeria.

Fani-Kayode's work explored Baroque themes,[12] sexuality, racism, colonialism and the tensions and conflicts between his homosexuality and his Yoruba upbringing.

Fani-Kayode stated that his parents were devotees of Ifa, the oracle orisha, and keepers of Yoruba shrines,[8] an early experience that may have informed his work.

[14] His goal was to communicate with the audience's unconscious mind and to combine Yoruba and Western ideals (specifically Christianity), fusing aesthetic and religious eroticism.

[15] Describing his art as "Black, African, homosexual photography,"[16] Fani-Kayode and many others considered him to be an outsider and a depiction of diaspora.

[20] Speaking on Esu, he insists, "Eshu presides here [...] He is the Trickster, the Lord of the Crossroads (mediator between the genders), sometimes changing the signposts to lead us astray [...] It is perhaps through that rebirth will occur.

[27] Fani-Kayode is considered to be one of the most important artists of the 1980s,[25] and his work appears in several public and private collections, including the Guggenheim Museum, Kiasma-Museum of Contemporary Art, Tate, The Hutchins Center, The Walther Collection, Victoria & Albert Museum, Yinka Shonibare CBE, and others.

His work has been exhibited in the United Kingdom, France, Austria, Italy, Nigeria, Sweden, Germany, South Africa, and the US.

Fani-Kayode died at Coppetts Wood Hospital of a heart attack while recovering from an AIDS-related illness on December 21, 1989.

[2][5][6][7][36][37] At the time of his death, he was living in Brixton, London, with his partner of six years[25] and frequent collaborator Alex Hirst,[38][8] who died of AIDS in 1992.

One of the images in the series, "The Golden Phallus," is of a man with a bird-like mask looking at the viewer, with his penis suspended on a piece of string.

[12] In this image (The Golden Phallus), as in Fani-Kayode's Bronze Head, there is a focus on liminality, spirituality, political power, and cultural history—taking ideals seen as 'ancient' (in the display of 'classical' African art) and re-introducing them as a contemporary archetype.

In a time when African artists were not being represented, he provocatively approached the issue by addressing and questioning the objectification of black bodies.

"[45] "On three counts I am an outsider: in matters of sexuality; in terms of geographical and cultural dislocation; and in the sense of not having become the sort of respectably married professional my parents might have hoped for.