Jadé Fadojutimi – Paintings, Process, and Biography

Jadé Fadojutimi is a British artist known for large, color-saturated paintings that move between abstraction and recognizable form. Using paint, drawing, writing, music, and the physical energy of her studio, she constructs what she calls “emotional landscapes”: unstable environments in which identity, memory, and perception remain in motion.

Key Takeaways

• Fadojutimi was born in London in 1993 and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal College of Art.
• Her paintings combine gestural abstraction with fleeting suggestions of plants, bodies, garments, landscapes, and invented characters.
• Color is both a structural tool and a way of registering shifting experience rather than a code with fixed meanings.
• Music, Japanese animation and subcultures, clothing, collected objects, drawing, and writing all feed her studio practice.
• Her work is held by Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Walker Art Center, and other public collections.

Who Is Jadé Fadojutimi?

Born in London in 1993 and raised in Ilford, East London, Fadojutimi is a British artist of Nigerian heritage. She completed a BA in Fine Art at University College London’s Slade School of Fine Art in 2015, followed by an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2017. She received the Hine Painting Prize during her final year at the Royal College.

Royal College of Art in South Kensington; Shadowssettle, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Place matters to her work, but not as a simple biographical key. London formed the setting in which her visual language took shape, while repeated encounters with Japan have affected her understanding of color, sound, fashion, animation, and belonging. Taka Ishii Gallery reported that she moved her production base to Tokyo in fall 2025; its 2025–26 exhibition materials describe her as living and working between Tokyo and London.

How Her Painting Language Developed

Fadojutimi has identified a 2016 student exchange in Japan as a turning point. The visit complicated an imagined affinity with the country by making her recognize how much of her identity was tied to London. In a 2021 interview with Studio International, she explained that drawing became a way to work through that dislocation.

Back in London, she began painting faster, allowing wet paint, speed, and intuition to dictate the image rather than forcing her process to follow conventional technique.

Her first commercial solo exhibition, Heliophobia, opened at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in 2017. PEER presented The Numbing Vibrancy of Characters in Play in 2019, her first solo exhibition in a UK public gallery. That show established several concerns that remain central: large scale, forms poised between description and dissolution, writing made alongside painting, and the studio understood as an immersive world rather than a neutral workplace.

What Defines Jadé Fadojutimi’s Art?

Abstraction That Never Fully Abandons the Visible World

Fadojutimi’s work is usually described as abstract, but “abstract” here does not mean detached from observed life. Her canvases contain grids, looping lines, transparent veils, clustered strokes, and zones of scraped or wiped paint. These may suggest foliage, microscopic organisms, marine space, patterned cloth, limbs, faces, or landscape horizons, only to lose that identity when the eye tries to settle on them.

Jade Fadojutimi artwork; CC BY-NC 2.0, via Flickr

This movement between abstraction and figuration is fundamental. Figuration means the depiction or suggestion of recognizable things; abstraction reorganizes color, line, and form without requiring them to represent a specific object. Fadojutimi treats the two as ends of a spectrum. A form can resemble a flower, a bow, or a body for a moment without becoming an illustration of one. The resulting uncertainty makes looking active: recognition begins, fails, and begins again.

Color as Structure, Atmosphere, and Event

Color does more than decorate these paintings. It separates layers, creates intervals of depth, redirects the eye, and allows dense passages to coexist with open ground. Acid greens can sit beside bruised purples; warm reds interrupt cooler fields; pale lines skim over saturated paint.

Contrasts can make a canvas appear illuminated from within, while translucent layers expose earlier decisions below the surface.

The artist has described her paintings as “emotional landscapes,” but that phrase should not be mistaken for a fixed color psychology. A red passage does not always mean anger, nor does blue automatically signal calm. Color records changing relationships among mood, memory, material, and the surrounding studio. Its meaning develops through placement, texture, scale, and its interaction with other colors.

Movement, Layering, and the Studio as an Instrument

Fadojutimi often works at night and paints with her whole body, moving rapidly among large canvases while music plays. Some works are completed in a single concentrated session; she has called these “one-hit paintings.” Others are revisited, veiled, scraped, or built into denser strata. Gestural mark-making, a term for strokes that visibly register the movement of the artist’s hand and body, gives the surfaces their variable tempo.

Jadé Fadojutimi, The Night That Didn’t End; CC BY-NC 2.0, via Flickr

Her materials have expanded with the practice. Early works are predominantly oil on canvas. By 2020, acrylic and oil stick had become increasingly visible, letting her combine flowing areas of paint with sharper drawn lines. Recent paintings may include acrylic, oil, oil pastel, and oil bar. On a wet surface, the drier sticks can displace paint as well as add pigment, producing furrows and contours that sit somewhere between drawing and painting. Wiping away accumulated paint can also uncover buried color, so subtraction becomes as important as application.

The studio supports this improvisation. Fadojutimi fills it with drawings, clothes, soft toys, written phrases, music, and other objects. She has compared the space to a stage and to a bedroom: familiar enough to release inhibition, yet changeable enough to generate new encounters.

Older drawings may remain visible for years and later suggest a color relation or form without serving as a preparatory blueprint.

Anime, Music, Clothing, and Language

Japanese Culture and Sound

Japanese anime, video games, soundtracks, fashion, and subcultures have been sustained sources for Fadojutimi since her youth. Their influence is not best understood as a collection of images copied into paint. She is more interested in animation’s pacing, expressive color, storytelling, and ability to construct absorbing worlds. Instrumental soundtracks are especially useful because rhythm can shape the pace of a painting session without imposing a verbal narrative.

This relationship continued to evolve after her 2016 exchange and later periods spent drawing in Japan.

Our Inner Tide, shown across Taka Ishii Gallery’s Roppongi and Kyobashi spaces in 2025–26, paired paintings made in Japan with her first soundscape installation. The project made sound an exhibited medium rather than only a condition of production.

Clothing, Writing, and Titles

Clothes interest Fadojutimi as color, pattern, shape, and a means by which people construct a public self. A stocking, bow, scarf, or patterned fabric may be transformed into an ambiguous contour rather than depicted literally. This helps explain why her images can feel inhabited even when no stable figure is visible.

Writing develops in parallel. She records thoughts on loose paper, in sketchbooks, on her phone, or by voice while working. Titles often arrive during or after a painting and function as additional questions rather than explanations. Phrases such as A point to pointlessness or There exists a glorious world. Its name? The Land of Sustainable Burdens alter the viewer’s expectations but do not decode the pictures.

Selected Paintings and Turning Points

I Present Your Royal Highness, 2018

First shown at PEER in 2019 and acquired by Tate that year, I Present Your Royal Highness brought Fadojutimi’s work into a national museum collection while she was still in her twenties. The painting’s field of pinks, yellows, maroons, and greenish passages is crossed by competing strokes and rounded forms. A figure can be glimpsed within the accumulation, but it never separates cleanly from its setting.

Tate’s gallery interpretation connected the title’s mock ceremony to ego and self-expression, while the surface makes identity appear composite and changeable.

A point to pointlessness, 2019

Now in the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, A point to pointlessness is an oil painting in which yellow and blue loops emerge from a translucent magenta area against black. Lines converge near the center, then loosen toward the edges. The work demonstrates how Fadojutimi can create depth without conventional perspective: transparent color, overlapping marks, and shifts in density produce a space that seems navigable but has no fixed ground.

A Dwelling of Absence; CC BY-NC 2.0, via Flickr

From The Luna(tic) Effect to The Generosity of Trauma

The Luna(tic) Effect, 2020, marked what the artist called an important development: the introduction of acrylic into her painting language. The change widened the range of drying speeds, opacities, and drawn effects available to her. In There exists a glorious world. Its name? The Land of Sustainable Burdens, also from 2020 and now in the Studio Museum in Harlem, oil stick interrupts the layered oil surface, showing how drawing began to press more forcefully into painting.

By The Generosity of Trauma, 2024, acrylic, oil, oil pastel, and oil bar occupy a single canvas.

A yellow ground supports red, purple, and green marks that can be read as an overgrown garden or as a purely abstract network. The painting was completed in about two hours, according to a New Yorker studio profile, but speed did not eliminate layering. Colored ground, sweeping strokes, and linear incisions compress successive decisions into one luminous surface.

Exhibitions, Collections, and Wider Recognition

After the PEER exhibition, Fadojutimi presented Yet, Another Pathetic Fallacy at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, in 2021, her first solo museum presentation. She took part in the Liverpool Biennial that year and in The Milk of Dreams, the central exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale, in 2022. The Hepworth Wakefield’s 2022–23 exhibition Can we see the colour green because we have a name for it? included works made in response to the scale and architecture of its galleries. DWELVE: A Goosebump in Memory at Gagosian in 2024 was her first New York solo exhibition.

International Art Exhibition, Jadé Fadojutimi, Rebirth; CC BY-NC 2.0, via Flickr

Her paintings are held in public collections including Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Walker Art Center, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Stedelijk Museum, and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. These acquisitions and exhibitions document the rapid institutional reception of a practice that is still changing in medium and location.

How to Look at a Fadojutimi Painting

Begin with movement rather than subject. Follow one line until it disappears under a veil or changes direction; notice where thick and thin marks establish different speeds. Then step back and watch recognizable forms emerge from the whole. A plant, face, garment, or horizon may appear, but it need not remain stable.

Next, examine how the ground participates.

Open areas are not empty: they control the pressure around dense clusters and determine whether a mark appears to float, recede, or press forward. Finally, consider the title as another layer. It may introduce humor, contradiction, vulnerability, or a question, yet the visual evidence should remain primary. The work does not ask to be solved so much as revisited.

Conclusion

Fadojutimi’s paintings make self-knowledge look provisional. Their grids, stains, drawn contours, erased passages, and bursts of color hold multiple readings without settling into one. Her achievement lies not simply in intensity or scale, but in building a flexible language through which painting can register how identity changes across places, memories, materials, and moments of attention.

Frequently Asked Questions

When and Where Was Jadé Fadojutimi Born?

She was born in London in 1993 and raised in Ilford, East London. She is a British artist of Nigerian heritage.

Where Did Jadé Fadojutimi Study?

She earned a BA in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2015 and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2017. She also received the Hine Painting Prize in 2017.

What Style of Art Does Jadé Fadojutimi Make?

Her work is best described as gestural contemporary painting that moves between abstraction and figuration. Recognizable forms may surface briefly, but color, line, layering, and movement prevent them from becoming fixed images.

What Materials Does She Use?

Depending on the work, Fadojutimi uses oil, acrylic, oil stick or oil bar, and oil pastel on canvas. She also makes drawings with materials including oil pastel, colored pencil, and felt-tip pen, and first exhibited a soundscape installation in 2025–26.

Why Is Anime Relevant to Her Work?

Anime contributes to her thinking about color, rhythm, storytelling, and immersive world-building. Its influence is atmospheric and structural rather than a matter of directly copying characters or scenes.

Where Does Jadé Fadojutimi Live and Work?

Taka Ishii Gallery reported that she moved her production base to Tokyo in fall 2025 and describes her as living and working between Tokyo and London. Her career and painting language remain closely connected to both cities.

Where Can Her Work Be Seen?

Her work belongs to museums in the United States and Europe, including Tate, the Studio Museum in Harlem, ICA Miami, the Walker Art Center, LACMA, and the Stedelijk Museum. Because collection displays rotate, visitors should check a museum’s current listings before traveling.