J adé Fadojutimi calls herself a ‘composer of colour, space, and environments.’ Her paintings have an incredible sense of depth, created from the symphony of rhapsodic colour of her brushstrokes. Standing in front of one of her vast canvases, the environment that the painting creates is all-encompassing, as if the painting has surrounded you and pulled you inside. Fadojutimi considers herself a writer as much as an artist, so it is no surprise that she describes herself so perfectly.
At auction this week is her painting Cradled, made in 2018. That same year, she painted I Present Your Royal Highness, which is now in the Tate Collection, making Fadojutimi the youngest artist represented there. Stare at Cradled for long enough and you begin to feel as if you have entered the painting, losing yourself in its world of swirling, dynamic colours. Critics have often noted the way Fadojutimi walks a line between abstraction and figuration. She describes it as a ‘dialogue’ between the two ways of describing the world, with lines and shapes suggesting forms without ever quite congealing into them.
Fadojutimi is a Londoner through and through. Born in 1993, she graduated from the Slade School of Art in 2015 and received her MA from the Royal College of Art, where she won the Hine Painting Prize, in 2017. Though her background is British Nigerian, Fadojutimi cites Japan as the culture that catalysed her artistic style and continues to inspire her. She was a huge fan of Anime as a child, which she says helped her find an outlet for her own intense emotions and feelings of depression. She now visits Japan multiple times a year for inspiration.
A rhapsody of colour in hues of lavender blue, moss green and canary yellow, the mesmerising Fishing For Steps (2017) – which will be offered at auction next week – exemplifies the dynamism and vibrancy for which Fadojutimi has become critically acclaimed. Painted during the final year of her MA program at the Royal College of Art, Fishing For Steps sees luscious strokes of pigment converge and coalesce is an explosive iteration of the artist’s intuitive practice. Embracing chance and chaos, Fadojutimi transforms the canvas into a complex emotional landscape which explores themes of identity, self-knowledge and unresolved emotion.
She held her first solo exhibition in Asia at Taka Ishii in Tokyo in 2022. The connection is clear between her work, with its bright, blocky colours, thick outlines, and dreamy ethos and that of Japanese artists like Makiko Kudo, whom Fadojutimi names as one of her favourite artists. She also counts Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Joan Mitchell, and David Hockney among her great inspirations. Their legacy of jubilant colour radiates through Fadojutimi’s work. She has diagnosed herself with synaesthesia, a condition for which there is no test, but which she feels describes her organic and omnipresent experience of colour.
In the six years since she left the Royal College of Art, Fadojutimi’s rise to fame has been stratospheric. Initially represented by Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, she has now been snapped up by Gagosian, one of the biggest galleries in the world. Her work was featured in the Venice Biennale in 2022 and is represented in public collections around the globe, including the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Albertina Museum in Vienna, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Tate, British Museum, and Hepworth Wakefield at home in the UK.
Basking in all this success, Fadojutimi is always dreaming bigger. She works in a vast studio space and has recently acquired an even bigger one, allowing her to realise her visions of epically monumental works. She works in a frenzy, often through the night when inspiration strikes her. Throughout her struggles with her mental health and the intensity of her work, she continues to find an outlet in expressing herself on canvas. She has said that painting makes her feel like she can breathe.
It is invigorating and rather staggering to encounter an artist at what feels like the height of her powers, knowing that she still has so much ahead. She is the counterpoint to the challenging tides that jostle young artists in the London art world: high rents, lack of government investment in arts education, and a continued interest in already-established big names. Fadojutimi has bucked all those trends to sail to the top before her thirtieth birthday. She is an inspiration for her fellow young Londoners–a true hometown hero, and a gargantuan force of a painter.
