We are all beauty, and that is what is encapsulated by the word life.
—Jadé Fadojutimi
In her paintings, which are often monumental in scale, Jadé Fadojutimi orchestrates color, space, line, and movement in the service of fluid emotion and the quest for self-knowledge. She interprets everyday experience in ways that reflect a drive to understand more completely the perpetually intertwined ideas of identity and beauty.
Fadojutimi was born in 1993 in London, where she lives and works. She graduated with a BA from the Slade School of Art, London, in 2015, and an MA from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2017 (also receiving that year’s Hine Painting Prize). Her solo exhibition The Numbing Vibrancy of Characters in Play opened at Peer, London, in 2019, and Yet, Another Pathetic Fallacy at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, in 2021. In 2022, she will have a solo exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield, England. Fadojutimi has also participated in several major group exhibitions and biennials including Jahresgaben 2020 at Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany; The Stomach and the Port, Liverpool Biennial, England (2021); Mixing It Up: Painting Today at the Hayward Gallery, London (2021); and The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Biennale di Venezia (2022).
Making use of key visual elements from twentieth-century painting such as grids, layers, and disparate marks, Fadojutimi conjures a sense of continual transformation. Her compositions can suggest plants, microbes, or marine landscapes, but edge consistently toward abstraction. Described by the artist as “environments,” these complex arrangements are built up with layers of oil paint, sometimes interrupted by lines of oil pastel. Fadojutimi also combines elements of clothing—swatches of fabric and the shapes of stockings and bows—with ambiguous outlines to reflect the trauma of displacement.
Fadojutimi draws inspiration from specific locations, cultures, objects, and sounds, especially Japanese anime, clothing, and soundtracks (she traveled to Japan after graduating from the Slade, then again for a residency in 2016, and now returns to the country several times a year). Writing, too, is key to her process—sometimes she uses it to help articulate the subtleties of her painting; at other times she positions it in parallel to the visual by adopting a more poetic approach. For Fadojutimi, her roles as artist and writer are equally important aspects of her creative practice.
