London-based, British artist Jade Fadojutimi paints vivid abstractions of animated lines and gestural strokes in layered washes of color. Her paintings are lyrical passages – halfway between abstraction and figuration – and are her way to explore environment, identity, and the formation of the self.
While Fadojutimi studied in Britain at the Slade School of Fine Art and received her M.A. from the Royal College of Art in 2017, the primary influence in her art was anime. This stye led to her learn Japanese, visit Japan several times a year, and do cosplay in Lolita-style clothing. Her longing for Japan came about from feelings of displacement living in Britain. She has little to do with her own upbringing as a Black British young woman of Nigerian heritage. “There’s been a lot of people look at my work and say it doesn’t look like I’m Black. . . my practice rejects labels and celebrates individuality without contextualizing someone into a category. . . the only thing I wanted to do was to make big canvases.”
She paints monumental paintings whose size allows her to escape into her work. Her paintings are vivid because color is everything to her. She always engages with color. Color is the first thing she sees when she enters a room, takes a walk, or looks at the world around her. She recently started painting with neon colors because she loves the different spectrum of light that neon produces.
She weaves together color fields and explosive brushstrokes with subtle figurative hints barely able to be seen. These could be faint landscapes, plants, marine life, specific locations, microbes, or suggestions of everyday objects. While these figurations may reveal layers of meaning, they actually edge towards abstraction. Mostly she paints in oil but has added acrylic, pastels, and oil sticks to her layers of oil paint.
Her 2019 “My Pathetic Fallacy” is a large-scale oil painting with brown bow shapes, a central figure that resembles a scaly body, and red sinewy lines that seem to move.
Her 2021 “When will the sun rise?” is an oblique reference to the Covid pandemic during the time she was painting this work. The ‘sun’ in the painting’s title peeks out at the top of the composition behind a thicket of wild, brushy strokes.
Fadojutimi has exhibited in solo and group shows in London, Berlin, Cologne, and Kyoto. In 2019, she became the youngest artist in the Tate collection. In 2021, she had her first solo museum show at Miami’s Institute of Contemporary Art.
Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Stedelijk Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, Tate London, and Walker Art Center.
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