From her early shows at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London and Gisela Capitain in Berlin, launched just after her graduation from the Royal Academy, Jadé Fadojutimi’s ascent to contemporary art stardom has been nothing short of meteoric. In a few short years, her abstract paintings—crafted by the now 31-year-old British artist of Nigerian heritage—have entered major collections worldwide, with auction prices soaring into the seven-digit range. Her record, set last March at Christie’s London, saw The Woven Warped Garden of Ponder (2021) fetch £1.6 million ($2 million), tripling earlier results and affirming her place as one of the brightest lights in today’s art world.
Leaving behind her early dealers, Fadojutimi made a high-profile move to Gagosian in 2022, debuting with a full takeover of the gallery’s booth at Frieze London. Yet despite her market dominance, her work retains its raw, pulsating vitality—a deeply personal yet universally resonant exploration of self-knowledge. Her paintings are an intricate tapestry of marks, gestures and flowing tides of paint, born from an immersive emotional and physical connection with the canvas. Fadojutimi paints with a visceral urgency, intuitively moving across the surface as if surrendering to its gravitational pull.
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Evoking landscapes and maps of spaces unbound by traditional borders or timelines, her compositions are an open invitation to wander. The layered systems of marks lead the viewer’s gaze into a mesmerizing drift, free from any singular focal point or symbolic anchor. Her work becomes an endless accumulation of traces—existential annotations mingling with spiritual, almost ritualistic gestures. As Fadojutimi paints, she aligns herself with a universal flow of energy, constructing vast territories that oscillate between disorientation and reorientation, transcending linguistic, cultural and individual boundaries to access a cosmic realm of connection.
Her debut exhibition at Gagosian in New York, “DWELVE: A Goosebump in Memory,” showcases this evolution with works that are even more dynamic and intricate. These new pieces layer gestural marks into dense, complex surfaces that seem to exist simultaneously across spatial and temporal dimensions. Fadojutimi delves into and dwells within the canvas, her movements capturing the perpetual layering and rewriting of memory and experience. This existential layering extends to a series of paintings on paper and her lively diary, which documents her daily impressions as an extension of her body and mind.
The interplay of diverse color gradients and tones in Fadojutimi’s work creates a palpable tension between the layers and traces, which alternately harmonize or clash. This dynamic mirrors the conflicting thoughts, inputs and emotions our brains wrestle with as they process the overlapping events of our internal and external worlds. Some canvases plunge into nocturnal or marine tones, evoking the depths of the subconscious or a celestial plane, while others radiate warmth and airiness, channeling the sun’s terrestrial brilliance. This fluid ascent and descent—from otherworldly dimensions to earthly grounding—might explain the goosebumps her work evokes, a visceral reaction to its powerful resonance.
Fadojutimi’s orchestrations of marks and chromatic sensations form a rich palimpsest of how memory and the mind truly operate. Her abstractions vividly capture the physical, temporal, psychological and energetic experiences of our reality, layering them into works that feel alive. As “DWELVE: A Goosebump in Memory,” nears its final weeks, we sat down with the artist to discuss how this latest body of work reflects her continued exploration of identity, emotion and experience through the language of abstraction.
There can be different approaches to abstraction: one more spiritual and lyrical that tends to distill sensations similarly to poetry or music composition, the other more expressive and physical, based on gestures and intuition in a transfer from intention to movement. Which one do you feel that best describes your approach?
That’s the first time I’ve heard those two approaches defined as separate languages. I hope my paintings can oscillate between these approaches and blur the boundaries, like some sort of abstract Impressionism. My work lingers between the descriptions you gave, and I hope that it highlights some unique qualities of my painting language.
The show’s title, “A Goosebump in Memory,” seems to suggest a connection between those paintings and the memory process. Does it reflect that connection, and how do you use color, space and line to explore identity through emotions and experiences?
My practice has longed to express and translate a more transient approach to questioning identity through attempts to blur and blend life experiences into a permanent and visual conversation through the language of paint. With this show, I wanted to capture the essence of my notebooks and how they seem to be a visual diary that translates for me as an everyday curiosity and acceptance of daily emotional and environmental changes I hope to reflect on and exist within once more. The paintings capture those “goosebump” worthy events that I want to dwell upon permanently with the viewer and delve more profoundly through the discussion and discourse they create through color, form and mood.
Every painting starts differently, as I have quite an open and diverse approach to painting. My painting language has blossomed from experimenting with liquid, a medium that is the main ingredient for the work besides paint. I might start from a drawing and transpose its essence onto the canvas as a starting point, and then, as I begin to respond to the painting as a separate work, other drawings bleed into the work as notes. Some paintings don’t even start with a drawing. It might begin with a composition, a color palette or a reference to something I’ve seen recently that caught my attention.
Your work proceeds through an intense but largely spontaneous and potentially endless accumulation of painterly gestures and brushstrokes. How do you decide when a painting is complete?
I feel that a painting is finished when I spend more time with my work as the viewer rather than the artist. There’s a moment when you can’t help but spend time with work rather than paint. It steals your attention. It’s at that moment that I decide whether something is missing, and if not, I leave the work. I feel there are qualities that I look for in each work that help me understand when a work is finished by asking myself what I want from the work, but more than that, I believe there is always a point where an artist must surrender their role to the work.
Jadé Fadojutimi’s “DWELVE: A Goosebump in Memory” is on view at Gagosian through December 21.
